Calvin
Theological Journal 34 (1999): 431-442
Copyright © 1999 by Calvin
Theological Seminary. Cited with permission.
Arie C. Leder and David A. Vroege
The apostle
Paul's instruction that "all Scripture is God-breathed and is use-
ful for teaching, rebuking,
correcting and training in righteousness" (2 Tim.
today knows as the Old Testament. This, of course,
includes Leviticus. In prac-
tice, however, Leviticus is
generally not a major item in the church's teaching
of righteousness. It is also not the object of the
usual devotional literature pre-
pared for God's people. Although certain texts
receive regular attention-
chapter 19, which summarizes the law, and
chapter 25 on the year of
jubilee--the rest of Leviticus tends to be heard
in the church indirectly, if at all,
through the book of Hebrews.
There are reasons for the silence of Leviticus
in the church. First, its prac-
tices and rituals are
strange; they are not of our world. Few people experience
the smells and sounds of sacrifices; our blood and
other body fluids do not play
a role in our religious obligations; our dining
practices are not prescribed; we
do not need priests. This, coupled with a
hermeneutics that teaches Christ's ful-
fillment of the law and its
ceremonies, appears to legitimize Leviticus' silence.
Second,
Leviticus' ritualistic life is difficult for Christian traditions that since
the
Reformation
are decidedly iconoclastic and antiritualistic.
Julius Wellhausen
and Max Weber have contributed to this notion by
arguing that genuine reli-
gion and religious
leadership is spontaneous and charismatic, and that ritual-
istic religion and
institutionalized, priestly leadership reflects a deterioration in
personal religion and charismatic leadership.1
Contemporary charismatic
views take the spontaneous to be spiritual, the
prepared uninspiring. Third,
the rituals and practices of Leviticus are not
explained for the reader. Thus, in
1 For an extensive discussion of these
issues see Rodney R Hutton, Charisma and
Authority in Israelite
Society
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), especially chapters 1 and 6.
431
CALVIN THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 432
an a-ritualistic culture where the capacity for
understanding the depicted
divine-human relationship by means
of a complex vocabulary of symbols is
anorexic, Leviticus' speech falls on deaf ears.
These and other reasons for the silence of
Leviticus in the church merit seri-
ous response, but that
would take us beyond the limits of a brief discussion. In
this article, Leder
proposes to begin a reading and hearing of Leviticus for the
church by means of a sermon based on Leviticus
24:10-23, a text that instructs
The
sermon was prepared by Calvin Theological Seminary student David A.
Vroege as part of a class assignment for an exegetical
course on Leviticus.2 First
Vroege presents the text of his sermon in its
entirety; after that Leder focuses
on aspects of the sermon that provide an entrance
to the reading and hearing
of Leviticus.
"Crime and Punishment": A Sermon on Leviticus 24:10-23
Sisters
and brothers in Jesus Christ,
After losing the two opening games in the NBA
finals this year, Larry
Johnson
of the New York Knicks was.
. . well you could say, not in the mood to
talk about it. And so, when reporters hounded him
with questions about his
performance, he launched into a verbal tirade. The
newspapers described it as
uncalled for and loaded with expletives.
At
times, haven't we all felt the way Larry Johnson felt? And just maybe
we've reacted the same way occasionally? At the end
of a long day or at the end of
our rope, we just let it all out--and when it comes
out the sounds ain't sweet. Some
of us, when we were younger, might have had our
mouths washed out when we
cussed. Others of us, who still have to watch our
mouths around our parents
and teachers, may have to endure other punishments.
We can all identify.
When
words are offensive, punishment follows.
And this is what Leviticus 24 is about.
Leviticus as a whole strikes as a strange
book--perhaps one of the strangest in the Bible. But
at least something of this
passage ought to resonate with us: cursing and
consequences; crime and then
punishment. As strange or unfamiliar as the book of
Leviticus may be, this pas-
sage reminds us of some key items in God's redemptive
plan. We'll touch on a
few of them. But what we see at the core is that
when God's name is blas-
phemed, the appropriate punishment
must follow. And even more generally
than that, whenever people sin against God’s law,
the Lord requires the appro-
priate punishment.
To get at the core message of Leviticus
24:10-23, we'll simply follow the three
scenes of the text. Scene 1, verses 10-12, reports the
sin; scene 2, verses 13-22,
2 This article will not engage Vroege about the hermeneutics, exegesis, or homiletical
strategies that inform his sermon; that would
produce a different article.
433 Leder
and Vroege “
relates the instruction of the Lord concerning
the sin (as well as other sins);
and scene 3, verse 23, describes
Sin. Instruction. Obedience.
Scene 1 describes the sin, but if we're going to
follow the story as we read it
in Leviticus 24, I suppose we had better think a
bit about the sinner, the perpe-
trator of the sin. The sinner
is, well, a man who both fits in and doesn't fit in.
He
fits in because he is half-Israelite, and his mother's family tree is provided
in
verse 11 to prove it. He has a right to be there
among the Israelites. But, in a
way, he doesn't fit in, too. He doesn't fit in
because he's half-Egyptian. And the
fact that he's half-Egyptian means that, when he
sins, the people of
kind of at a loss. What do you do with this guy? I
mean, he sinned, but do the
rules apply to him? Where does his ethnic background
leave him: an outsider
or an insider? If you go to, say,
side of the road? When do which rules apply to you?
If you're a citizen of both
God's
kingdom and of
vote for which candidates, or to listen to which
music?
So the sinner is a mixture: He's a gray area
when it comes to loyalties and
responsibilities. What about the sin?
The sin, unfortunately, is all too clear; it's
black and white. One writer has described how sins
can be placed into two cate-
gories: sins of attack or sins
of flight. Sins of flight are those in which you evade
God,
you flee from him and from doing what's right--think of Jonah. Sins of
attack, on the other hand, are those in which you
attack God or his good cre-
ation--think of greed or lust
or anger. Scene 1 clearly presents us with a case of
a sin of attack: blasphemy against "the
Name." In fact, it's a vicious attack: the
combination of the words blaspheme and curse right
next to each other in verse
11
indicates that this man was ruthless with God's name; he dragged it through
the mud. In ancient times even more so than today,
a name was intimately con-
nected with one's character,
with one's person, with who you were. So, for this
man to "diss"
God's name was, in effect, to say, "God--and let everyone around
me hear it--you mean nothing to me." He may
have been fighting another
Israelite,
but the attack really fell upon God.
The Israelites, then, don't know quite what to
do with this guy. He's not
fully Israelite; yet he's attacked God's name and by
doing so, has threatened their
own sense of who they are. He's done wrong, but
maybe he doesn't fit under
their rules. Maybe he belongs under someone else's
jurisdiction. And here, the
Israelites
get it exactly right. Verse 12 says they wait for the will of the Lord to be
made clear to them. That's exactly it. One thing
this passage shows us is that the
Lord
makes the rules. Rules and punishment aren't the Israelites' problems,
they don't come from Moses--they're the Lord's and
his only.
That's scene 1: the sinner, the sin, and a
dilemma. Scene 2 brings us the
instruction, God's law, what we all think about when
we think of Leviticus! But
this scene, verses 13-22, teaches us something about
the whole of Leviticus.
Notice
that these laws in these verses are surrounded by a single story. It's a
"law
sandwich." There they are--these laws from
God sandwiched between a story.
CALVIN THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 434
I
read in one place that "these laws in verses 13-22 are an independent set
of
laws." The setting here in
chapter 24 cries out, "NO! Not true!" These aren't
independent laws. None of the laws in Leviticus are.
They all arise out of real-
life situations. In Leviticus, law and story shape
each other, dialogue with each
other, and comment on each other. They're a tandem;
can't have one without
the other somewhere nearby; like other meals need
salt and pepper, meat and
cheese, bread and wine, so a diet of Leviticus will fill
you with law and narrative
sandwiches. The laws in scene 2 are no
"independent set"; they're intricately
related to the story that surrounds it on both
sides.
Verses 13-16, then, deal with blasphemy. First,
take him outside the camp.
In
Leviticus, the camp was where the Lord's people lived and, more importantly,
it was where the Lord dwelt. The Lord camped among
them. And this camp
needed to be kept clean--clean and holy. This is
another huge part of what
Leviticus
is about. Consider how the Lord now gathers his people in a church
and that the Holy Spirit dwells right here among us
as believers, We have to
keep ourselves clean.
The church is God's; it's not for us to decide
what to do with it or how to
keep it. When we reach out to Prospect Park3
with the Good News, we're call-
ing people to something
real, something holy. And just as we're holy now
because of the Spirit's presence, so
presence there and then.
was, that's where it was at. And what was unclean had
to be dealt with, it had to
go--outside the camp.
It's interesting, to say the least, how they
were to deal with the sinner; inter-
esting because it sounds an
awful lot like a. . . sacrifice. If you read just the first
few verses of the beginning of Leviticus, you'll
read about how to offer a sacri-
fice. And one crucial
element in a sacrifice was for the worshiper, not the priest,
to lay his hands on the animal being slaughtered.
Here in Leviticus 24, all the
people who heard the sinner verbally attack the Lord
are to lay their hands on
his head. It's as if the guilt spreads. It's as if
everyone within earshot is polluted.
It's
as if. . . everyone within range becomes unclean,
"levitically" speaking. This
is another important concept in Leviticus. And it's
not as foreign to us as it
might sound at first. Think of so-called evils that
have a social aspect like racism
or pornography or environmental waste. What about
when your ears burn
3 Vrogege prepared
this sermon for the congregation of Unity Christian Reformed Church,
year 1999-2000. In an introductory note to the
assignment Vroege writes that "Unity is located
about twenty miles from
community (under the vision 'Presenting and
Advancing Good News for
I
think, at this point, I would almost certainly not preach this text (Lev.
24:10-23) on its own; rather,
I
would preach it as part of a series on Leviticus and thus it would already have
a context, i.e., as a
later installment in the series. This sermon,
however, does not assume a series; i.e., it could be
preached ‘on its own.'"
435 Leder
and Vroege “
because someone waiting in the line beside you
at McDonald's uses the "f”
word and Christ's name every ten seconds? Don't you
feel a little upset by it?
Maybe
you even feel a little affected by it? Especially if you've got your young
children with you? Even if this doesn't make you
guilty, at least it shows how sin
begins to spread, how uncleanness begins to spread.
And so all the Israelites
with burning ears are to transfer their guilt and
sin to the blasphemer so as to
rid themselves and the holy camp of this
uncleanness.
And so that's the Lord's will concerning the
blasphemer. There's the
instruction. But. . . surprise!
Scene 2 doesn't end there. There's more instruc-
tion. And this instruction
seems so out of place. The story is dealing with a blas-
phemer as scenes 1 and 3 show.
Scene 2 begins with the punishment for the
blasphemer. But, in verses 17-22, we get
instruction for. . . another problem, it
seems. It seems as if we've got an answer here, but
we don't have a question!
But there are some links and there are some
reasons for these instructions.
First,
the laws deal with killing--the killing of humans versus the killing of ani-
mals--in verses 17-18 as
well as 21. The obvious here is that the punishments
for these two actions are different. The punishment
for killing a human is
much more severe; it demands the death of the
killer. Killing an animal
requires death but only of another animal. Now,
we must remember a couple
of things here. Remember: Humans are made in the
image of God. We can
debate till the cows come home, what that means
exactly (there are some things
the Bible says about it, but that's another
sermon), but from beginning to end,
Scripture
is clear that humans are God's image-bearers. Remember, too: who a
person is is intricately
intertwined with his or her name. And so, coming at it
one way, we see that killing a person is an offense
to God because we mirror
him. Coming at it the other way, playing fast and loose
with God's name, with
who he is, includes attacks on his imagebearers, his walking, talking "mirrors."
See
how these two connect? Dealing with how to treat God's imagebearers
(humans) as well as his creation (the animals) falls under
the category of how
to treat God's name with honor. The table of
contents of "Honoring God's
Name"
includes at least these two chapters: 'What to Do When Humans Kill
Humans" and 'What to Do When Humans Kill
Animals."
There's our reason
then for why these so-called extra (or independent!)
laws are also in this pas-
sage.
Now, also in the midst of these unexpected laws
on killing is another law--
a rather famous one. All I have to say is
"an eye for an eye" and you know what
I'm
talking about. What we have here is the law of revenge. This is a law we're
all familiar with. We didn't learn it from the
Bible; this one just comes naturally
for us. These days it's
most frequently practiced on the streets and highways in
what's become known as "road rage." At the
same time, we Christians are pretty
accustomed to the notion that "an eye for an
eye" isn't the law to live by any-
more. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tears it
apart, right? "Don't resist an
evil person," he reinstructs. "Instead, go
the extra mile; turn the other cheek;
give away your coat." On the one side, then,
the "eye-for-an-eye" law is a nat-
CALVIN THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 436
ural--we don't have to learn
it, we “just do it." If anything, our problem is hav-
ing to unlearn it. On the
other side, though, we resist it. We keep alive the
reminder to "turn the other cheek"
(usually we like to remind others, not our-
selves), and we bless it with: “Jesus said so.”
However, there's a bit of a misunderstanding
here. What's important to
notice is that in Matthew 5, in the Sermon on the
Mount, Jesus doesn't com-
pletely trash the
eye-for-an-eye rule. What he does trash is the prevailing prac-
tice in his day to follow
that law with a rigid legalism. The law was never
intended for that. It wasn't meant to be taken
literally: "Oh, you poked my eye
out when you went for that rebound; now I get to
poke yours out." People got
so legalistic about following this law that they
forgot what compassion was, what
mercy was, what loving your neighbor was all about.
What the law was meant for
in Leviticus was to teach that breaking God's law
requires due and just punish-
ment--that, whenever people
sin against God's law, the Lord requires the
appropriate punishment. That's the message of this
law, and, not so surpris-
ingly, that is the message of
this passage. God requires the appropriate punish-
ment. Jesus wasn't rejecting
this law in Leviticus. What he was rejecting was
legalistic conduct that missed the spirit of the
law. God's people--Israelites,
Christians--aren't
supposed to live tit for tat. We live in loving service to God
and to neighbor.
Notice one more thing in scene 2. It closes with
the words of verse 22:
"You
are to have the same law for the alien and the nativeborn.
I am the Lord your
God." The same law for the
alien as for the native. This is an echo of verse 16.
Again,
further evidence that these "extra" laws in verses 17-22 fit with the
pas-
sage. There is one law. And it is God's law. The
basis for the law is God himself.
Israelite
society wasn't ultimately about laws; it was about rule by a person, by
God himself. The laws were grounded
in a divine person and directed toward
human persons. The laws are not abstract; they're not
impersonal. They come
from real situations (as we discovered earlier) and
they're "for the people."
That's what Leviticus is
about.
So, God requires a just punishment, whether it's
for blasphemy or for mur-
der. That's scene 2. And
this leads perfectly into scene 3. For here the people
simply do what God wants. They're obedient. Stoning a
blasphemer sounds
crazy to us; it doesn't fit with our way of thinking.
But the point is:
As
God's people, there are many things we're not necessarily called to: for
example, worldly success, fame, and popularity.
However, we are called to obe-
dience, to faithfulness, to
doing the Lord's will. These are the marks of a fol-
lower.
So where do we stand in all this? Where does
Leviticus 24:10-23 fit in the
scheme of things for us? If the message of this passage
is, “whenever people sin
against God's law, the Lord requires the appropriate
punishment,” what do we
do with that in
Good
News? Well, the principle of that law hasn't changed, of course. Where
there's crime, there has to be punishment. When
Larry Johnson flew off the
437 Leder
and Vroege “
handle, he had to pay $25,000. Our sin also requires a
payment. It's an Old
Testament
law and we're New Testament believers, but God's will never
changes. God still wants sin punished. His
justice requires it. But, as New
Testament
believers, we know and possess a great truth: It's been punished.
How does this passage fit into our
lives? Well, let's see if we can't make a
familiar law just a little bit more familiar. We
noted how the phrase, "an eye for
an eye" is so familiar that that's all I have
to say and we all know what it's about
in an instant. But, what about another phrase in
this passage that gets at the
same thing, but in a different way. . . a deeper way:
"a life for a life." Come at sin
from that angle: that it requires life for life;
that as much as humanity has been
killing itself with sin ever since the Garden of
Eden, lives have to pay the price.
Then
consider this: Consider what Jesus did on the cross; that he gave his life.
We
talked about the Israelites' obedience--Jesus was obedient to death, death
on a cross. We talked about how the Israelites
with "burning ears" had to rid
themselves of guilt, the guilt for blasphemy, and
that it was done rather. . . sac-
rificially--Jesus was the perfect
sacrifice, the perfect offering. We talked about
cleanness--Jesus washes us clean in the waters of
baptism. It amounts to this:
God
requires the appropriate punishment for the sin of blasphemy, and Jesus
Christ
paid it for us. He paid it for people who believe in Him.
That's the Good News that we bring to
been the last place you expected to see it, but
there it is: Good News. In this pas-
sage we learned about crime and punishment; the
Christian understands that,
in Jesus, the relation between these two is good
news; "Good News for Prospect
Park and beyond."
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit, Amen.
Reading Leviticus Through the Sermon
The exegesis brought into the sermon deals with
problems typical of
Leviticus:
the mixture of narrative and instruction, the juxtaposition of an
instruction that appears to be out of place, an
unfamiliar vocabulary, a sin that
appears quaint for postmoderns,
and a terrible punishment for this "quaint"
sin. Vroege does not
ignore these phenomena, nor does he treat them as obsta-
cles to be overcome by a
sophisticated approach to the text. Rather, he allows
the unique configuration and phenomena of the text
to contribute to an illu-
minating hearing of its message
for God's people today.
Vroege's sermon also provides us
with the following entries into the reading
and hearing of Leviticus: the mixture of narrative
and instruction, the distinction
of holiness and the Israelite-Egyptian's
blasphemy, and the terrible task of
cleansing the camp.
Narrative
and Instruction
Vroege does not separate the
instruction (Lev. 24:13-22) concerning blas-
phemy from the narrative that
surrounds it (vv. 10-12 and 23) ; and for good rea-
CALVIN THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 438
sons. The instructions make no sense without the
narrative: What is the reason
for the death sentence? Why go to God in this case?
Did
tion? Nor, for that matter,
is the narrative complete without the instructions:
What
is the consequence for blasphemy? Who will execute the punishment.
and how? The narrative relates an event; the
instruction gives shape to that
event. In its combination of narrative and instruction,
Leviticus 24:10-23 mim-
ics the larger book of
which it is a part: Leviticus is a narrative intersected by
divine instruction.
From the perspective of the Pentateuch this
seems obvious: Leviticus forms
part of the narrative that tells of
and before, of its salvation from
desert to the plains of
itself shows that it continues the narrative with
which Exodus ends. After the
glory cloud fills the Tent of Meeting (Ex. 40:34-35),
the narrative continues in
Levitcus 1:1: “The Lord called to Moses and spoke
to him from the Tent of
Meeting. He said: . . .4
The speeches of Leviticus, then, are part of the narra-
tive event of Sinai that begins
in Exodus 19; they give shape to that event as do
the instructions of Exodus 20-23 (covenant laws)
and Exodus 25-31 (taberna-
cle building instructions).
The crucial difference is that in Leviticus God no
longer speaks from the top of
camp of
has become "incarnate" in his people's
midst. The consuming fire Israel saw if
from afar (Ex. 24:17) is now very near (cf. Heb.
Leviticus
narrative must now be read in terms of the last narrative event related
in Exodus: God's indwelling of the tabernacle.5
The God who turned obstinate
who would have destroyed stiff-necked
sion, now resides in
ing and hearing Leviticus,
for Leviticus answers the question: How can God's
people survive his blazing glory? The answer: It lets
all the generations of
hear, through Moses, the divine instructions that
will keep it holy and clean in
his presence, whether in the desert (Num. 5:3), in
the land (Num. 35:34), or
beyond (Luke
4 The syntax of Ex. 40:36-38 defines these
verses as an aside that looks
ahead to
9-10.
Thus, all of Leviticus takes place at
See
footnote 5 on the strategy of sequential reading.
5 James W. Watts
("Public
4
[1995]: 543) argues that "laws were intended to be heard in the context of
other laws and
narratives surrounding them. . . . Unlike law,
narrative invites, almost enforces, a strategy of
sequential reading, of starting at the beginning
and reading the text in order to the end. The
placement of law within narrative conforms (at
least in part) the reading of law to the conventions
of narrative.
439 Leder
and Vroege “
This is the God to whom
problem of blasphemy by the Israelite-Egyptian,
as Vroege points out. This is the
God
whose presence in
by anyone. It is this narrative that now gets
uniquely informed by an instruction
concerning the alien (24:16) that, as Vroege argues, fits with the passage and is
not out of place. And so, the Israelite-Egyptian
dies for his sin, as did Nadab and
Abihu (10:1-2) , for
"among those who approach me I will show myself holy; in
the sight of all the people I will be honored"
(10:3).
The pentateuchal
narrative contextualizes the divine speeches of Leviticus.
It
lets the reader know who speaks (a compassionate and jealous God), to
whom he speaks (a stiff-necked and undeserving
people), and describes the
history of the relationship between the two
(salvation and grace upon grace).
Reading
Leviticus independently from this account, as a mere collection of
instructions, not only robs the
instructions of their narrative rationale but also
obscures the grace and justice of the God who
speaks to his own as he leads
them on their pilgrimage to the fulfillment of the
promise made to Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.
Life
in God’s Presence: The Distinction of Holiness
Leviticus assumes a clear separation between the
covenant people and the
rest of the nations. This teaching has its roots in
God's acts going back to
Abraham,
whom God separated from the nations, even from his own family
(Gen.
12:1). From that point on, Abraham and his descendants were called to
live separate, holy lives (Gen. 17:1). At Sinai, God
redefined this separation
from the nations when he revealed that
would be his "kingdom of priests and a holy
nation" (Ex. 19:6). Leviticus
teaches
arate (The key word is to separate or to distinguish [Hebrew: bdl / hbyl]):
You must distinguish
between the holy and the common, between the
unclean and the clean, and you
must teach the Israelites all the decrees the
LORD has given them through Moses. (Lev.
10:10-11, my emphasis)
You must distinguish
between the unclean and the clean, between living
creatures that may be eaten and
those that may not be eaten. (Lev.
emphasis).
But I said to you, "You will possess their
land; I will give it to you as an inheritance,
a land flowing with milk
and honey. I am the LORD your God, who has I set you
apart from the nations. You
must therefore make a distinction between
clean and
unclean animals and between
unclean and clean birds. Do not defile
yourselves
by any animal or bird or
anything that moves along the ground--those which I
have set apart as unclean for you. You are to be holy to me because I,
the
LORD, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.
(Lev. 20:24-26, my emphasis)
CALVIN THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 440
Leviticus
20 shows that the distinctions by which
distinction that God made between it and the
nations. These distinctions God
impresses upon
its diet, diseases, birth, and bodily functions
(Lev. 11-15); regulate its work in
the fields (Lev. 19, 25); define its sexual
relationships (Lev. 18, 20); and layout
the requirements for its priests (Lev. 8-10;
21-22). Nothing escapes God's
instructions, not what
of it (cf. Mark
God's name. And it did not matter that he was not a
"regular" Israelite, as
Vroege says. He got no special treatment. Even though
the sinner was a mix-
ture, his sin was not. And
so
"strange mixture" and learns that the "extra"
law about aliens in Leviticus 24:16
not only fits the narrative context, but also, as Vroege argues, that it is part of
the one law that rules life in the presence of the
lawgiver himself.
Blasphemy of God's name is a
terrible problem for the Israelite-Egyptian
because he, with the rest of
upon the people who live in his presence. The
distinctions God has given Israel
protect it in God's inescapable presence. So,
for example, after instructing
Israel
in how to deal with the uncleanness of the bodily discharges of men and
women, God tells Moses: "You must keep the
Israelites separate from things that
make them unclean, so they will not die in their
uncleanness for defiling my
dwelling place, which is among them" (Lev.
instructs Moses: "I will set my face against
that man and I will cut him off from
his people; for by giving his children to Molech, he has defiled my sanctuary and
profaned my holy name" (20:3, my emphasis).
Sin, uncleanness, unholiness,
however defined for
instruction, is not primarily an offense against a
neighbor because it causes per-
sonal, social, or
environmental brokenness. Uncleanness offends God; it defiles
his dwelling place and it mocks
Adam
and Eve were expelled from
God
walked, so now God's people, when they defile God's presence, suffer the
consequences. That is why the
Israelite-Egyptian blasphemer was taken outside
the camp (Lev. 24:14). Levitical
instruction seeks to keep the children of the
covenant from repeating the sin of Adam and Eve
by teaching them what
makes them different from the nations, and why (cf. 1
Cor.
6:14-7:1).
Life in God's presence has consequences, especially if we forget the
distinction of holiness.
Cleansing
the Camp: A Priestly People
General impressions notwithstanding, Leviticus
is not a book by priests for
priests alone; it is priestly instruction for a
priestly people. From the opening
instructions about the burnt
offerings to the last chapter about redeeming
what belongs to the Lord, the ordinary Israelite is
taught how to live in God's
presence. There are things only the priests are
allowed to do: sprinkle sacrificial
441 Leder
and Vroege “
blood on the sides of the altar, place the sacrifice
on the altar, or declare some-
one clean or unclean. Nevertheless, the Israelite
must place his hand on, and
himself slaughter, the victim at the time of the
burnt offering (Lev. 1:4-5), and
the person who has been affected by uncleanness has
the responsibility to pre-
sent himself to the priest for the declaration of
uncleanness and cleanness (Lev.
13).
Thus the priestly people and its priestly leadership together live out die
Lord's
instructions. The priests teach
which all
holy lives in the presence of God. Whatever defiles
the presence of God must
be dealt with accordingly.
mission to the covenant Lord (Ex. 19:8; 24:3,
7), as we see in Leviticus 24:10-23.
God's instructions concerning the blasphemy of
the Israelite-Egyptian
included the terrible task of cleansing the camp,
a cleansing that involved the
people themselves: those
who heard the blasphemy are to place their hands on
the offender's head, and all the assembly must participate in the sentence of
stoning. At this point in his sermon, Vroege reminds the congregation of the
burnt offering instructions in Leviticus 1 and the
responsibility of the individ-
ual Israelite to
acknowledge his guilt. This is not the priest's burden. In
Leviticus
24, however, "it's as if everyone within earshot is polluted. It's as if
.
. . everyone within range becomes unclean," says Vroege. Thus the narrative
ending of the text reminds all readers and hearers:
"Then Moses spoke to the
Israelites, and they took the blasphemer outside the
camp and stoned him. The
Israelites
did as the LORD commanded Moses" (Lev. 24:23). Similar inclusion in
the guilt of sin and the responsibility of the
community to maintain the camp
clean in God's presence is related in the case of
those who give their children
to Molech, when God
declares that "if the people of the community close their
eyes when that man gives one of his children to Molech and fail to put him to
death, I will set my face against that man"
(20:4-5).
Leviticus articulates the gritty cost of the
priestly people's personal and
communal discipline. Distinguished from the
nations, this holy nation will not let
the nations define its identity or public
activities (cf. 1 Peter 2:9-12). Rather, it
accepts the priestly calling that all God's
people are responsible to work out
their holiness with fear and trembling for it is the
God in their midst who will
work in them both "to will and to act according
to his good purpose" (Phil.
Conclusion
Although Leviticus is a strange book, it is not unpreachable. Nor is it
beyond the reach of God's people if we read it in its
narrative context and if
we keep in mind the importance of God's separation
of his people from the
nations and their stated commitment to live out
the priestly instruction heard through
God's
chosen servant. There are many other issues that need to be addressed:
the strangeness of the rituals and symbols, the
reasons for separating certain
animals for
441 CALVIN THEOLOGICAL
JOURNAL
certain mixtures (Lev.
Commentaries
will also help us understand what Richard Lisher
calls a "lin-
guistic base camp," the
biblical vocabulary that defines a worldview and identi-
fies God's separate people
in the world to keep it sheltered from the free
market of ideological pluralism. With such an awareness
of our linguistic base
camp we need not be creative or sophisticated; it will
not be necessary to reread
Leviticus
in the light of our own experiences or feelings, for "our effectiveness
as preachers depends not on the originality of our
rhetorical choices but our
conformity to the language that has been given us."7
6The best commentary for work in the
church is still Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of
Leviticus, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), This is so
because Wenham is not only
careful to let Leviticus itself speak, he also
links it with the New Testament throughout: This
is not the case in the otherwise useful
commentaries by John E, Hartley (Leviticus,
Word
Biblical
Commentary [
and Community [
Westminster,
1996]).
7 RichardLisher,
“The Interrupted Sermon,” Interpretation 50
(1996), 171-72.
This
material is cited with gracious permission from:
Calvin Theological Seminary
Grand Rapids
www.calvinseminary.edu
Please
report any errors to Ted Hildebrandt at: