Leviticus Part 7

 

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Agriculture, Debt Forgiveness, Carrots, Sticks,

and Votives

I know, it seems like a lot, but we're going to finish Leviticus today and that's all there is to that.

    As we all know by now, almost all of the chapters in Leviticus open up with,

The Lord spoke to Moses

right? Now, I can't get the image out of my head of God holding forth on the summit of Mount Sinai, surrounded by all sorts of smoking and flaming and glitter bombing special effects, and Moses standing there, steno pad in hand, wishing he had paid more attention during the semester of shorthand he took at Cairo Community College. And God isn't helping by skipping all over the place, going directly from how to purify a new mother to how to spot (no pun intended) a case of galloping leprosy, or from the correct way to slaughter an animal to who it's okay and not okay to have sex with.

    As challenging as it must have been for Moses to keep up with the subject changes, these last three chapters might have been even more difficult because the instructions God is dictating are way specific and involve a fair amount of calendar and math references that, if gotten wrong, could mess up everything. I mean we've all seen how he reacts when somebody strays a bit from the guidebook he has in his celestial brain. I have to admit that even though I've read this final section more than a few times through, taking notes and exercising my highlighter each time, some of this stuff still boggles.

    So please accept the previous paragraph as my disclaimer for any wildly erroneous conclusions or calculations I may present here. As always, I invite you to read the material yourself, although we both know the likelihood of that happening is close to zip.

    

    Chapter 25 starts out simply enough with some advice (okay, OT God does not offer advice, he tells you what to do and kills you if you have your own ideas) about how to properly manage farmland. And yes, I still find it a head scratcher as to why he brings this up to a couple million folks who won't be settling down for another forty years. What land are they supposedly farming? Maybe he knows he's going to be busy with other divine duties around the time the Israelites are Manifest Destinying the Canaanites and Hittites and Floridianites off what they thought was their land. 

    What God wants Moses to pass along to his congregation is that when they do have their own fields and vineyards they need to let them rest every seven years. Simple enough. I'm no expert, but it does sound like good policy to me. God could have mentioned crop rotation too, but he didn't.

   Then, after a short bit about the Sabbatical Year, God spells out what he wants to happen every fifty years in is to be known as the Year of Jubilee.

    The whole fifty year spacing is arrived at in these two verses, which, I've got to admit, make my head spin.

8) You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. 9)Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month...

    What is "seven weeks of years" for cryin' out loud? Be that as it may, every fifty years there will be a Year of Jubilee. Fine. But what does that mean? If you're like me, you associate the word Jubilee with Queen Elizabeth II, or maybe in a stretch with revered military anti-strategist Jubilation T. Cornpone, whose statue looms over the town of Dogpatch, USA in Al Capp's brilliant comic strip "L'il Abner."

    Sorry, I'm straying again.

    The Year of Jubilee, as far as I've been able to figure out through multiple readings and an excessively extravagant six minutes of online research, is the happy time once every fifty years year when anyone who has been having a tough time financially, can look forward to their debts being forgiven and, in some circumstances, even getting back the family home or acreage that had been lost to foreclosure or sold off to pay debts. There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of "if/then" and "it all depends on" contained in this part of the chapter, and unfortunately we once again have a section that legitimizes the practice of enslaving other people and even passing them on down to the next generation, but an almost universal twice a century debt forgiveness seems to be the nub of the issue. I would go into more detail, but math is not my strong suit, never has been. If there are any CPA's in the crowd, perhaps you could bring some clarity.

    Chapter 26 is divided into two sections, one spelling out the good stuff God will do if you follow his commandments, and a much longer one offering an inventory of what'll happen to you if you don't. The good stuff features things like bountiful harvests and feeling all safe and secure and being able to strike fear into your enemies with your little sword, which I know is at the top of most GOP Amazon Wish Lists. The penalties portion features a wide variety of nasty things that God will do to you including, but not limited to, turning you into a cannibal, laying your cities to waste, scattering you and your neighbors hither and yon with no forwarding addresses, and being devoured by your enemies. Perhaps most devastating of all, God will no longer find your odors pleasing. Say it ain't so.

    We wrap up our frolic through Leviticus with Chapter 27, which is titled "Votive Offerings" and I must admit that on my first reading I had no idea whatsoever what was going on here. To me, the word "votive" evokes nothing so much as little candles and that didn't seem to fit the bill here. Then there is the word "equivalent", that is tossed around frequently, that one threw me completely for a loop. Let me give you an early sample, and see if it means anything to you.

1)**The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 2)Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When a person makes an explicit vow to the Lord concerning the equivalent for a human being, 3)the equivalent for a male shall be: from twenty to sixty years of age the equivalent shall be fifty shekels of silver by the sanctuary shekel.

    What is this "equivalent" of which they speak? Blast it all, more research was required. My thanks to the fine folks at the Yeshua Elohim Bible Church whose website provided a translation of the translation that is the New Revised Standard Edition Bible which is the Word of God as taken straight from the steno pad of Moses, having been filtered through a few other versions over the centuries (see "A Word From the Committee").

    Oops, I never defined what a votive offering means to God, Moses, Aaron, and the Gang. That one's pretty simple, at least according to the AI answer Google provides. It's something you bring to God that is what you might call a durable good. Something like, oh, a silver candlestick or a mahogany dining room table. You know, the sort of thing you might see on Antiques Roadshow. According to the Bible Church folks, what God expects when you bring him a bit of durable goods is that the value of said item should be commensurate with your gender and earning power. Middle aged men are expected to hand over more valuable stuff than a woman, regardless of age. That's what is meant by equivalent. And that, my friends, is just another example of how what we've read so far in the Bible lines up with certain political, social, and economic injustices we're still trying to correct.

    Back to votives.

    In verse 9 animals are mentioned as an offering option, so maybe that whole durable goods definition isn't that helpful. Geez. Anyway, the critter reference is the first in a whole list of items people might be offering to God. He tells Moses what he will and won't accept, what is his to begin with so don't even try, and whether the person doing the offering can ever hope to buy it back, which is what it meant by the word "redeem", which has nothing to do with S&H Green Stamps***. Surprise, surprise, but just about anything that can be redeemed is going to cost a good chunk of change more than it's actual value.

    This final chapter of Leviticus ends at verse 34 with this,

These are the commandments that the Lord gave to Moses for the people of Israel on Mount Sinai.

    From now on whenever somebody brings up the "Commandments" and I know they're just talking about the Famous Ten, I'm going to set them straight about the fact that there are actually about fourteen thousand of them, and hand them a Bible bookmarked at Leviticus.

*The photo for today is in honor of the Opening Ceremonies for the 2024 Paris Olympics. I'm certainly hoping that the games bring the world at least a little bit closer together.

**Does this work for you when I'm putting verse numbers in a quotation? There is probably a more elegant solution, but what that might be I have no idea.

***For anyone under fifty-five or so, you can look it up.