Leviticus Part 4

 

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Atonement, Scapegoats,

Animal Slaughtering Tips

 and

Who Not to Have Sex With

The title of Chapter 16 is "The Day of Atonement", which sounded kind of hopeful to me. What's not to like about taking a day and figuring out where you went wrong and trying to make good? And according to my five minutes of research, this is where the Jewish faith came up with Yom Kippur, which you may have heard of but, like me, didn't really have any idea what it was all about. What Wikipedia tells us is that this most holy of the holy days in the Jewish calendar is a time when the faithful are to consider and repent of the wrongs they have done in the past year and "focus on one's goals and accomplishments and setting yearly intentions", although where the emphasis falls, repentance or making progress toward a more just and purposeful life, seems to depend on which branch of Judaism a person follows. Either way, it seems like a great idea we could all use a bit more of, especially folks like the Orange Blister who maintains he has never done anything for which he would need to repent and why try to improve when he is already perfect? That, to my mind, is a lousy, not to say dangerous, attitude.

    Sorry, but I'm afraid there is no way I will be able to leave out the occasional reference to what is happening in the world today. There may or may not be a God, but as history has shown us too many times to count, if we're going to get through this "unprecedented" time of ours we're going to have to handle it ourselves.

    Where were we?

    That's right, Leviticus, Chapter 16, the Day of Atonement. Like a lot of the chapters here, it begins with the words,

The Lord spoke to Moses

    When you look up "Who wrote the first five books of the Old Testament?" dollars to donuts the answer you're going to get is that Moses has a pretty solid claim on the copyright. So why, you might ask, doesn't it read,

The Lord spoke to me

    You'd have to ask Moses and he's not available to give interviews. Maybe he just wasn't comfortable writing in the first person. Or maybe he was like those athletes who for some reason always refer to themselves in the third person. Or maybe...it doesn't matter.

    What matters is that each of these chapters that begin with "The Lord spoke" are apparently to be taken pretty seriously because every word is to be understood to be coming straight from the Creator His Own Darn Self. But if you will remember back in the installment here titled ""A Word from the Committee" we learned that God's Word has been through a whole bunch of editorial committees over the last century or thirty and, to quote Mr. Bruce M. Metzger, "no translation of the Bible is perfect or is acceptable to all groups of readers", so there is that. What God tells Moses to pass on to Aaron in this particular edition doesn't read to me like any sort of prescription for the everyday person to use to perform an annual assessment and come up with a plan to improve. Mostly it reads as an instruction manual on what animals to slaughter and roast and what to wear while doing it. And when to wash up.

    

    But before God spells out what he wants done with the livestock, we are told that this one sided conversation took place directly after God had prematurely and without warning cremated Aaron's sons Nadab and Abihu, which was back in Chapter 10. I'm still not sure what made him so mad at the boys. Here in Chapter 16 he does tell Moses to warn Aaron not to piss him off and, quite helpfully this time, spells out just what he happens to find irritating at the moment. Aaron, the Priest personally selected by God, not supposed to,

come just at any time into the sanctuary inside the curtain before the mercy seat, that is upon the ark, or he will die

    It is because,

for I appear in the cloud upon the mercy seat.

    Which I suppose is God's way of saying that he likes his personal space. By now we should know that God is not a big fan of a progressive sort of disciplinary plan, with verbal warning followed by written warning followed by possible suspension with or without pay, and subsequent violations resulting in loss of employment and bad references. God likes to keep things either you live or you die, or, chaotically, "Let's just keep you guessing and see whether or not I incinerate you, okay?"

    Later in this installment we'll learn about a slightly less extreme punishment God calls vomiting, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

    Let's summarize this chapter bullet point style. On the Day of Atonement Aaron is to:

• Bring a young bull and a ram to the Tabernacle
• Put on his priestly linen garments
• Bathe
• "take from the congregation of the people of Israel two male goats for a sin offering and one ram for a burnt offering"
• Offer the bull as a sin offering in order to "make atonement for himself and his house." 
• Incense is to be brought inside the curtain. Yep, the same curtain Aaron has been warned, on pain of death, to stay the heck away from. And blood is to be sprinkled on the mercy seat. If I was Aaron I would want something in writing guaranteeing any mercy seat adjacent activities will not result in a fiery termination of employment.
• Cast lots for the two goats
• One will be assigned to the Lord (killed)
• The other will be assigned to Azazel. Like we're supposed to know what or who Azazel is. What we do learn later is that Aaron is to place a hand on the goat and psychically burden the beast with "all the iniquities of the people of Israel" and then send it into the wilderness. And that, my Dear Readers, is where we get the term scapegoat. Aren't you glad you've stuck around?
• Slaughter the goat that drew the Not A Scapegoat lotto ticket.
• Sprinkle more blood.
• Take off his linen kit and take another bath.
• Put on his vestments.
• Burn some fat.
• Aaron's assistants are also instructed to bathe.

    The chapter closes with instructions to repeat this ritual every year on the tenth day of the seventh month. Nobody, priest or lay person, pure blood Israelite or resident alien, is to do any work on that day. Everyone is to "deny" themselves, which is generally understood to mean fasting. God tells Moses that this Day of Atonement is to be,

 an everlasting statute for you to make atonement for the people of Israel once in the year for their sins.

    As far as I can tell, the no work and fasting rules are still in place, more or less depending on the individual and their congregation. The sacrifices and the scapegoat parts have fallen out of favor. Not sure what God thinks about it.

    I think we can sum up Chapter 17 pretty quickly. 

• Once again, "The Lord spoke to Moses."
• The Lord tells Moses that all of the sacrificing of animals is to be done where he can see it, in other words in the Tabernacle.
• Sacrifices performed without official sanctioning, outside the camp, will be regarded as suspicious and likely to be associated with "goat demons."
• No blood eating.
• Anyone who eats an animal that died of natural causes or was "torn by wild animals" must wash up and put their clothes in the laundry and wait until evening.

    You know how Chapter 18 begins, right? 

The Lord spoke to Moses

    Exactly.

    And what the Lord tells Moses is that he isn't going to tolerate any kinky sexual behaviors like those practiced by the Not Chosen Folks in Egypt or Canaan and if Moses isn't sure what the Lord is referring to, he's got a list of What, or rather (in most cases) Who, Not To Do. It should be noted that God is a bit timid here, choosing to use the euphemism "uncover the nakedness" instead of "do the nasty" or any other more explicit phrase, but it's still pretty easy to catch his drift.

    Here is the list of whose nakedness they should not, on pain of being "vomited" out of nice society, be uncovering:

• Next of kin
• Father
• Mother
• Father's wife
• Yep, bigamy/polygamy were acceptable, perhaps encouraged, lifestyle options
• Sister
• Father's daughter
• See polygamy note
• Mother's daughter
• See polygamy note
• Son's daughter
• EEEWW!
• Daughter's daughter
• Come on, folks! This should go without saying.
• Father's wife's daughter begotten by your father.
• For pity's sake.
• Aunt on your father's side
• Aunt on your mother's side
• This one I'm still puzzling over. See what you make of verse 14
• You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father's brother (so far so clear) that is, you shall not approach his wife, she is your aunt.
• What?
• Daughter-in-law
• Do tell
• Brother's wife
• A woman and her daughter
• A woman's son's daughter or her daughter's daughter.
• The mind boggles.
• A woman as a rival to her sister
• Now I'm thinking he's just rambling, but there must be a reason he is including it.
• A menstruating woman
• Kinda shifting gears here, but okay.
• A kinsman's wife

    Then, just for a bit of variety I suppose, in verse 21 God tells Moses to tell his people not to

• Sacrifice their children to Molech
• Even though I'm already at my limit of five minutes of research, I had to check out this Molech. The answer turns out to be pretty simple. Molech was a god of some standing amongst the Canaanite population who favored his sacrifices on the young and tender side. I'm beginning to understand God's low opinion of the Canaanites. Not that he doesn't have some work to do himself.
• And then, in verse 22, we get the one that gets trotted out all the damn time by people who have a low opinion of anyone whose lifestyle they find icky.
• You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is an abomination.

    Up until then, most of what God had had to say about controlling ones urges seemed to make pretty good sense to me in a keep-peace-in-the-family and avoid-the-perils-of-inbreeding sort of way.  But verse 22 just comes out of the blue and it made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, this was Moses inserting a freelance, ghost writer bit of his own just because he had a personal issue with homosexuality. And even if it did come from the Mouth of God, let's all keep in mind that back in Chapter 11 the same Mouth told everyone not to eat shrimp.

    Oh, and this just occurred to me. All of this uncovering the nakedness forbidden territory is aimed at the guys. Does this mean women can do whatever they want? I doubt it. It probably just means women aren't important enough to even enter into the conversation here and what they need to keep in mind is they belong to a man and he'll be the one to tell them what they can and cannot do.

    Or, it could mean the God sees nothing wrong with a bit of sapphic activity. Might be.

    Everyone is warned off having sex with animals. I'm inclined to side with this one since sex really should be a consensual act.

    The final verses wrap things up with God reminding the Israelites that he's only bringing this sex (and Molech) thing up because he doesn't want them to become like the folks he's going to be tossing out of their homeland so the Israelites can move in. He doesn't threaten death if they disobey, but he does promise "the land will vomit you out for defiling it" and who wants to be barf?

    To close the chapter he uses his patented sign-off.

I am the Lord your God. And for the love of me please vote blue!**

*An American Kestrel

**I may be a bit off in my translation from the original Hebrew, but that's how it looks to me.