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.

Leviticus Part 6

 

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Blemishes Need Not Apply

Sorry for the delay between Part 5 and Part 6. I've been reading Leviticus, taking notes with my trusty fountain pen, but one of my typing fingers has been sidelined a bit by a stupid infection** that makes it painful to type and damned impossible to play my guitar. Not that I would dream of subjecting you to my guitar playing, but I must say it has affected my quality of life these past several days and, I am rather ashamed to say, has rendered me just a tad surly. The finger, or at least the border between the nail and the flesh, is still angry at me, but the antibiotics have at least started to do their thing, so it's time to type, even if it is ever so gingerly.

    And so we begin here with Chapter 21, which is titled "The Holiness of Priests" and honestly I didn't get much out of it. Well, that's not really true, it did prompt me to look up the word "defile" as it is used in the Bible, and it looks like it means anything that makes a person or an object or animal or baked good, or whatever, unclean in the sight of the Lord, who, as we have learned here, is super intolerant of imperfection. 

    Getting that definition of defile was nice, but it didn't really clear things up for me regarding just what is meant by passages like this one that follows the usual--all together now!--"The Lord spoke to Moses" opening.

    No one shall defile himself for a dead person among his relatives, 2 except for his nearest kin: his mother, his father, his son, his daughter, he brother; 3 likewise for a virgin sister, close to him because she has no husband, he may defile himself for her.

    How one might go about defiling oneself for a dearly departed relative I am not sure, but there is mention of bald spots and shaving off the edges of beards and gashing of skin, so maybe indulging in a bit of dishevelment personal grooming-wise is what it mean. If I had to speculate I would say such behaviors might have been traditionally accepted ways of expressing grief back then. You know, like rending a garment, or forgetting to shower.

    Another no-no when it comes to acceptable priestly behavior is that they really shouldn't tie the knot with ladies of the evening, if you know what I mean. Widows and divorcees are also off limits to the union membership. Just another example of God wanting only the New and Unblemished.

    There is more about how priests are to be neatly groomed and nicely attired at all times and then we get a repeat of the "only marry a virgin" rule, just to make sure Aaron and Sons are paying attention. Maybe God saw one of the boy's eyes linger on young Widow Schnitzlehoser at the last Ladies Auxiliary meeting.

    The part that really got my attention starts in verse 16, where the whole "without blemish" obsession gets applied to just who can and cannot aspire to the priesthood.

    No one of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the food of his God.

    You might be inclined, as I was, to think, "well, maybe God is just talking about folks whose character is a bit sketchy, who are blemished in a moral sort of way." But we would be wrong, because God goes on to spell out just the sorts of disqualifying conditions he's talking about: blind, lame, face or limbs not quite normal, a hunchback or a dwarf, these are the sorts of physical issues that mark a person as unworthy to be a priest.

    What a nice God.

    The chapter ends by telling us that Moses passed all of what God had told him onto Aaron and Sons and everyone else in the congregation, which, since I haven't brought it up in a while, I'll remind us all must have been something over two million human beings. I guess he sent an email blast.

    And now we come to the instructions relating to "The Use of Holy Offerings" as spelled out in Chapter 22.

    Here is where you can find out about who God considers worthy to partake of the food stuffs the congregation brings to the tabernacle as offerings. You'd think this might have logically come during, or at least right after all of the stuff about Burnt Offerings and Grain Offerings and Sin Offerings and Offerings of Well Being that are covered in such detail in Chapters 1-4, but here it is in Chapter 22.

    Anyway. Once again, God has some pretty strict rules about who can and cannot take a nibble. As best as I can tell, it's limited to priests who are in good standing and who haven't done something like touching a corpse or a swarming thing or had one of those unfortunate semen emissions. If any of those things apply, it's the old "wash up and wait until sunset" rule for them.

    One interesting bit is that a person who has been purchased by one of the priests can eat the offering comestibles. So who says there isn't an upside to being enslaved?***

    God also takes some pains to point out that all offerings must be perfect. No blemishes. If we've got a theme here, I'm thinking this is it.

    Recognizing that everyone likes a party, there are some Heavenly Sanctioned (also Mandatory) Festivals to be observed. And Chapter 23 is where you can get the deets so you can put them in your Google Calendar.

    But first, please remember that the No Work Rule applies to the festivals same as the sabbath.

• Passover: 14th day of 1st month
• the next day is International Unleavened Bread Day
• Offering of First Fruits Festival: I could not locate a date. Perhaps this is in recognition of the fact that the first fruits are likely going to show up when they want to each year. It's just a guess.
• Festival of the Weeks: 50 days after the 7th sabbath. No, I did not do the math or consult the Jewish calendar. Oh, what the heck, I haven't used my five minutes of research time yet...
• This is what the nice AI thingie has to say about the Festival of the Weeks. I hope it doesn't mind me quoting it verbatim, using its IP to flesh out my little blog.
•  The Jewish festival of Shavuot, also known as the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost, is celebrated 50 days after the second day of Passover, or seven weeks later, on the 6th of Sivan. 
• Wondering what Sivan is? AI knows that one too.
• Sivan is the third month on the Jewish calendar counting from Nissan.

    No, I'm not going to look up what a Japanese car company 

is doing in the Old Testament.

• There is a list of what God expects to be offered up during the F of the W. Two loaves of bread, seven lambs, each a year old, a young bull, two rams, a male goat, and two male lamb, each a year old (seems redundant, but there you are). Oh, and some nice bread made with choice flour. All should be blemish free or there will be arched celestial eyebrows and somebody just might find themselves on the wrong end of an incineration.
• 
  
• Festival of Trumpets: First day of the seventh month.
• There will be trumpet blasts.
• No working. Unless you're a trumpet player, and then you'd better not be expecting union wages.
• 
  
• The Day of Atonement: Tenth day of the seventh month.
• Everybody fasts.
• Nobody works.
• Anyone caught eating gets kicked off the island.
• Anyone caught working is retired from service. Permanently.
• *****
• Festival of the Booths: Not photo booth or restaurant booth. In this context it seems "booth" means the same thing as "tabernacle" although why the word is introduced at this point I have no idea.
• Oops, almost forgot the "when" bit: 15th day of the seventh month. Duration: seven days. 
• Doesn't it kinda seem like folks should just take the seventh month off from work altogether?

    Let's wrap up this installment with Chapter 24, which is titled "The Lamp", but which is actually broken down into three distinct sections.

1. The Lamp: Use good olive oil in the tabernacle's lamp and put it on a stand of pure gold. Got it? Good
2. The Bread for the Tabernacle: Make a dozen loaves of good bread each week, add some frankincense to the oven so it smells nice (but what smells better than freshly baked bread? Whatever). The bread is for the priests.
3. Blasphemy and Its Punishment: Gather everyone who heard the awful words, tell the blasphemer he or she is invited to a barbeque just outside the camp, and stone that person to death.
1. Harsh, I know. But not unexpected considering what we've been learning about ol' Yahweh.

*A window shop pic taken decades ago with my trusty Nikon FM.

**The best guess is that the damn fig tree is where my finger got infected. Tiny abrasion, introduction of some malevolent organism, that sort of thing. If you ever get cast as either Adam or Eve in some sort of pageant and the costume designer wants you to try on a fig leaf outfit I would suggest you decline.

***I assume you know I'm being facetious, but just in case you're wondering...I'm BEING FACETIOUS!

****Watch out for those fig trees!

*****I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get rid of those pesky unwanted bullet points.

    

Leviticus Part 5

 

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Crime and Punishment

(So what else is new?)

One of the things I think we've learned about God so far is that he likes to use repetition to make a point. And I can't disagree, after all it is a tried and true pedagogical method. If you missed him telling you not to tell a lie in Exodus he's going to remind you in Leviticus and it will probably come up later too. He also likes to make any promised disciplinary actions memorable. The next two chapters we're going to look at here consist of more rules (surprise!), many of which are going to be repeats, followed by the consequences if one doesn't follow the rules, although it must be pointed out that not all of the Do's and Don'ts in Chapters 18 and 19 are covered in the This Is What Will Happen To Yous of Chapter 20. Once again, a good editor would have come in handy, but then again, who is going to line edit God? He's gonna tell us what he wants to tell us and anything he leaves out is none of our damn business.

    Let's get to it.

    Can anyone tell me what Chapter 19 begins with? If you answered,

The Lord spoke

    you've been paying attention and I appreciate you. And what the Lord spoke about in this chapter has to do with Ritual and Moral Holiness.

• Ritual
• Keep the sabbath
• No messing about with idols
• Anytime you make a sacrifice of well being, which I'm sure you recall is what you call it when an animal is ritually slaughtered as a sort of bloody thank you card to God, make sure all the resulting roasted meat is eaten within two days. This may be one of the first examples of the use of "Best By" dating on food. 
• Anyone nibbling on the leftovers on the third day receives a one way ticket out of town.

• Moral Holiness
• When harvesting grain or grapes, leave some for the less fortunate
• I know I brought this up earlier, but what is the point of handing out agrarian life guidelines, however kindhearted and well intended, to vagabonds? These folks aren't destined to settle down in one place for forty years for goodness sake. Maybe hold those agricultural helpful hints for when the Israelites are within a week or so of dispossessing the Canaanite farmers.
• Don't steal. This is covered in both verse 10 and verse 13. Oh, and The Ten Commandments.
• Don't lie. We've heard that one before.
• Don't "swear falsely by my name." 
• Don't commit fraud.$
• Don't hold back wages from your workers.$
• Don't make fun of the disabled.$
• Don't be unjust.
• Don't defer to "the great".
• My take on this is we shouldn't assume that just because someone is famous, or has acquired a bunch of money, that they are somehow wiser or kinder or more moral.
• Don't slander.$
• Don't try to advance yourself through violence (bloodshed).$
• Don't hate.
• Don't seek vengeance.$
• Don't bear a grudge.$
• Here's a Do. It shares Verse 18 with the bits about not taking vengeance or bearing a grudge.
• "but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord."
• I do like the bit of emphasis he put on this one.
• Back to the Don'ts. Don't cross breed animals. I guess that was an issue then and perhaps the results were unfortunate. Unicorns with platypuses perhaps. Awkward.
• Only one kind of seed per field.
• Maybe crop rotation is still okay.
• Don't mix materials in a garment.
• There goes poly-cotton.
• Verses 20-22 are devoted to the issue of sexual relations with someone else's slave girl.$ The punishment is not death and atonement is available.
• Verses 23-25 covers the all important question of "When can I eat the fruit from the trees I'm going to plant in the orchards I'll be acquiring through Manifest Destiny?"**
• If you're wondering, the first three years are off limits, the fourth year's crop goes to the Lord, and the fifth year is when you can take a bite.
• Don't eat blood.
• Don't mess with augury (omens and predictions and such) or witchcraft.
• Hmm, how about political polling?
• There are rules regarding haircuts and beards.
• No tattoos.
• In Verse 29 the Lord tells Moses that he looks unfavorably upon the practice of selling ones daughter into prostitution.
• Keep the sabbath. (See "Rituals")
• Another caution regarding wizards is in Verse 31.
• Verse 32 says, and I quote, "You shall rise before the aged, and defer to the old."
• A few of our nervous Democrats might want to cherry pick that one back into their own personal scriptures.
• Don't oppress resident aliens.
• A whole bunch of GOP folks seem to skip over this one.
• No cheating when it comes to weights and measures.

    And now, to answer the question "Oh yeah? What're You Gonna Do About It?" that might have been prompted by the Do's and especially the Don'ts in Chapters 18 and 19, let's go to Chapter 20, which is titled...

Penalties for Violations of Holiness

    How does it begin? All together now...

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying...

    Instead of going through this chapter verse by verse, I'm going to try to organize things according to punishment.

• Things That Will Get You Killed (Method of execution unspecified unless otherwise noted)
• Messing around with Molech. (Stoning)
• Cursing Mom or Dad
• Adultery with
• wife of neighbor
• father's wife
• daughter-in-law
• Seems a rather short list, but actually, I think it covers the vast majority of possibilities.
• Sex with
• Another man
• Ones wife and her mother (Burned to death)
• An animal (Animal must also die)
• This is one of those rare sex don'ts that includes the possibility of a woman being the guilty party.
• Things That Will Make You "Subject to Punishment"
• Sex with
• Sister 
• Not a nun. Or at least I don't think so.
• Step or half sister
• Sex with aunt
• Something That Will Get You Banished
• Sex with "a woman who is in her sickness"
• Something That Will Render You Unable to Have Children
• Sex with your sister-in-law

    God closes out the chapter in rather long-winded form, but it pretty much boils down to a couple of bullet points.

• Obey my laws or you'll be vomited out of town.
• I'm paying all of this attention to you folks because:
• "I have separated you from the other peoples to be mine."***
• "Oh, sorry, nearly forgot to let you know that in case you happen across any wizards or mediums, I want them stoned to death."

*A nice footbridge at Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, AZ.

**The phrase Manifest Destiny may have been coined in 19th century America to try to toss the garment of legitimacy on the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans and the stealing of their lands, but the concept of "I'm taking your land because God told me he wants me to have it" is as ancient as mankind.

***Seems to me that a whole lot of the troubles this old world has experienced in the past umpteen thousand years stems from the inevitable friction that happens when one Chosen People encounters some other Chosen People and there is a tract of desirable land they are both eyeballing.

$ As I was reading and then typing this installment, a certain political figure kept coming to mind. The Israelites had their Golden Calf, it seems we have our Orange One.

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.

    

    

 

Leviticus Pt 3

 

 *

116 Verses All About Leprosy

and

Just 33 Verses about Bodily Discharges

I'm going to try to make this brief, mostly because it's all kinda gross.

    Chapters 13 and 14 are all about leprosy, which I guess was a pretty big deal back in the day, so I can understand why God wants Moses and Aaron to have the latest medical info in order to keep the troops safe. And honestly, I would be interested to know how all the godly advice presented here jibes with modern science. Not that I'm going to call an expert or Google it, because I've got other things I want to do today, like practice on my alto recorder. So for now let's just have a quick look at the material as presented in Leviticus.

    There is a lot of "how to diagnose" material here and we won't go into anywhere near all of it, because like I said, it's kinda gross. A lot is what to look for in skin color, hair color, does a rash appear to go deep or is it kinda superficial, that sort of thing. The point here seems to be God wants Moses and Aaron to be able to tell the difference between leprosy and, let's say a bad case of carpet burn or a big hickey. 

    And it must be noted that God expects all of the leprosy diagnosis and treatment to be handled by the priests, aka Aaron and Sons, which makes me wonder if they would have signed up for the gig if they knew this was part of the job description. Of course, they probably didn't think being incinerated was part of the company disciplinary code until they saw what happened to Nadab and Abihu, so what's one more surprise?

    Anyway, if a itchy, rashy parishioner presents him or herself to the priest and is found to have hair in the diseased area that has turned white and the rash is "deeper than the skin of his body", or any of the other signs that God spells out that indicate a by golly case of leprosy or, even worse, spreading leprosy, he is to enforce a 14 day period of quarantine, which seems like a reasonable thing to me.

    There isn't much of anything offered up here beyond the diagnosis, quarantine, and some washing up advice. Absolutely nothing helpful regarding treatment, which to me is puzzling. I mean you'd figure that if anyone knows how to put together a good treatment regimen it's gotta be the Almighty, but I guess he just wants to see how long it's going to take his Finest Creation to come up with the multi-drug therapy of dapsone, rifampicin, and clofazimine on their own. Turns out it took about thirty-five centuries, give or take.

    There were a couple of verses that stood out to me so I'd like to share them here.

40 If anyone loses the hair from his head, he is bald but he is clean.

45 The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, "Unclean, unclean."

    Do with these verses as you will.

    The inspection process for garments is also covered in Chapter 13. Proper disposal of clothing deemed to be irredeemably unclean is by fire. No word on whether God finds the odor pleasing.

    Chapter 14 moves on to consider any dwellings that might have a leprosy germ or three hanging about and gives instructions on what the priests (these guys have a really wide ranging area of responsibilities that I hope is reflected in the compensation package.) need to do in first determining if said domicile is truly contaminated, and then what to do about it in the way of removing and disposing of any befouled materials. A lot of the recommendations seem pretty spot on, but God once again follows them up with the old flinging about of bird blood trick and I think we can agree that that part of the process has worn out its welcome here in the 21st century and thank goodness for that.

    Finally for today, we have Chapter 15, which is titled "Concerning Bodily Discharges" so you know a good time is to be had. 

    The first fifteen verses are concerned with unspecified discharges from a man's "member". As far as what the discharge itself is, I'm guessing we're talking about...oh, hell, I don't know what we're talking about, I'm not a urologist. STD's maybe? UTI's? Too much asparagus for dinner the previous evening? I have no idea. 

    What I did learn from this chapter is that there is a lot of cleaning with water to be done, and it's best to avoid everything that the discharging man has worn, touched, sat on, drunk out of, or rode on. And, no surprise, once an eight day ritual of laundry and bathing has been observed, a bird or two needs to have its head wrung off and blood flung about the room. You know, on second thought maybe we are missing something here in modern times, blinded by our own antipathy to the cleansing properties of bird blood.

    

    Or maybe not.

    Verses 16-18 are all about semen. For example:

18 If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening.

    Sounds okay. Play a bit of hide the sausage, then splash around in the tub for a while. Once again "until the evening" is mentioned. That phrase is used what seems like dozens of times in reference to when you can consider yourself to be a socially presentable human being after having had sex or touched a dead weasel or sat on a chair that had been previously sat on by a dude having discharges (yuck) or any number of incidents requiring a sanitation reset.

    I guess I should look it up.....

    .....Okay, according to gotquestions.org, "Your questions, Biblical answers", the evening, or sunset, marked the end of the old day and beginning of the new day for the ancient Israelites. That's interesting, and I suppose a new day brings new beginnings, so we'll just leave it at that.

    The rest of this chapter deals with a woman's menstrual discharge. Consistent with the way women have been presented so far in the Bible, this is described as the time of her "impurity" and not only is the woman considered unclean, meaning she's not welcome at church services, but so is darned near everything she may have touched whilst going around being impure. And if she happens to do some serious canoodling with her husband or boyfriend during this time of impurity not only is he unclean for a week, so is the bed he sleeps on and the donkey he rode into town. Unclean. Wash up. Wait until...seven days has passed. A whole week of evenings/

    And just as I was wondering what sort of consequences might befall someone who dares darken the doorway of the tabernacle in a state of uncleanness, along comes verse 31.

31 Thus you shall keep the people of Israel separate from their uncleanness, so that they do not die in the uncleanness by defiling my tabernacle that is in their midst.

    So there you have it. Just as failing to eat your goat meat** at the proper time can get you killed, so can showing up for services after a roll in the hay if you haven't washed up and waited until evening.

*I figured a pretty picture of a flower might take some of the "ick" factor out of today's subject matter.

**As we all found out in Leviticus Pt. 2