Alastair's Adversaria - The Levitical System for the Uninitiated

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

The following was first published on my Substack: https://argosy.substack.com/i/145389515/the-levitical-system-for-the-uninitiated. Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

The following reflection, entitled The Levitical System for the Uninitiated, was first published on the Anchored Argosy. Many a well-intentioned program to read the Bible through in a year has founded upon the rocks of the book of Leviticus. If the instructions for building the tabernacle and the description of its construction at the end of Exeter seem tedious, at least they are not anywhere near as strange and foreign as the book that follows. To understand the sacrificial system,

we need to inhabit a very different mode of sense-making in the world, one that is quite strange to us, although perhaps not altogether as foreign as we might at first think. While we largely understand the world through abstractions presented to the detached eye of theoretical reason, the sacrificial system is addressed to people who understood the world through a more practical, poetic and concrete logic. Such a form of sense-making is a great deal more sophisticated

than moderns typically appreciate, and when grasped, may reveal just how limited our ways of inhabiting and interpreting the world can be by comparison. As children of the modern world, we tend to think about things in terms of abstract and disembodied concepts. Christians, for instance, can be tempted to regard the tabnacle and sacrificial system as pictures, particularly of Christ. The point, we suppose, is to reflect upon the pictures and to see what ideas, they are teaching. There is some element of truth there, but it is also rather misleading. The tabernacle and the rights of the sacrificial system were designed to be inhabited as symbolic objects and practices that ordered them towards a reality encountered within them.

They were not primarily designed to be looked at from without, and translated into abstract ideas. The whole sacrificial system, for instance, was an extensive poetic mapping of Israel's life onto the animal and vegetable realm of creation, ordered around an architectural symbol, the tabernacle that was, among various other things, a macrocosm of the human body and a microcosm of the creation, and practiced within the patterns set by celestial bodies and the earth's seasons. Israel was to make sense of and articulate its existence and its fellowship with God

in terms of this profoundly material and concrete reality. For Israel, the created cosmos was not merely a site for the operation of mathematical laws upon generic particles, nor a reservoir of raw material to be extracted and pressed into the service of humanity's power, nor even primarily a realm of beautiful surface spectacles to gaze upon. It was a charged realm of meaning and communion, where the various objects of the world communicated different facets of divine truth. Such a system of analogies cast the particular concrete realm and its constitutive differences into sharp relief. The animals of the sacrificial system and the dietary laws, for example, presented Israel with a system by which to understand and be formed into its unique place in the world.

Clean and unclean, sacrificial and non-sacrificial animals, and the many distinctions within each category were metaphorical frameworks within which Israel could practice. actually arrive at a clearer apprehension of itself and its relationship with God. The sacrificial system was a concrete framework designed to teach the art of discrimination in the realm of the particular. This contrasts radically with our abstract structures of thought. The people related to God through specific and symbolic sacrificial practices in which the restoration of their relationship with and their new comportment of themselves towards God was symbolically enacted by them in the sacrificial rights. Within such a framework, specific differences had great salience.

Male and female, Jew and Gentile, circumcised and uncircised, priest, ruler and people, first-born and later-born, cooked and raw, seed-time and harvest, within and without the camp, clean and unclean, holy and common, feast, fast and ordinary time, morning and evening, etc. These differences are highlighted through metaphorical and poetic frameworks of thought and practice that are designed both to bear considerable weight and to have authoritative and theological force. To sacrifice a donkey rather than a bull for the priest, for instance, would be a violation of truth, not merely the breaking of an arbitrary ritual command. It would be to say something untrue with one's action.

As a creature, the donkey symbolizes something different from the bull, the two are not interchangeable. As a meaningful system of specific elements, the sacrificial system had a sort of linguistic character to it. Naftoli Meshel tries to present a grammar of this system in his book on the subject. When we think of words, we might instinctively think of them

as if they were tags referring to objects in the world. However, words also function within systems, playing off the meaning of other words that are in some sort of relationship with them. For instance, the words canine, dogo, dog, pet, very good boy, buster, hound, pooch, whipper or mutt, could all refer to the same creature. However, each of these terms has different connotations, evoking different fields of meaning and associations. The elements of the sacrificial system, the sacrifices, the rituals and their elements, the largest ceremonies, the tabernacle and its furniture, the priests, etc., all belong within a great network of interrelated symbolism, within which countless analogies, associations, and contrasts are discovered.

When considering a sacrifice, for instance, you might ask questions like the following. Who is the offerer? What type of animal is offered? What species? What age? What sex? What actions are performed upon the animal before it is killed? Where is the animal killed? How is the animal divided? How are the parts disposed of, arranged, prepared and or eaten? Where does the blood go? What parts of the offering are eaten? By whom are they eaten? What parts were disposed of in some other manner? Each one of these elements can differ from sacrifice to sacrifice, both distinguishing a sacrifice from and relating it to other sacrifices and elements of the wider system. The sacrifices often function like conjugations of a verbal root. Sacrifices such can involve ascension of an offering on an altar, a blood right, and a sacrificial meal. Yet Israel's sacrifices varied in the prominence that was given to these elements.

The ascension, or a whole burnt offering, foregrounds the ascension of the offering on the altar. The purification or sin offering foregrounds the blood right. The peace offering foregrounds the sacrificial meal. The fundamental template of rituals could be varied on unusual or exceptional occasions. For instance, the two goats on the Day of Atonement are an elaboration of the pattern of the sin offering. The ram of ordination in Leviticus chapter 8 is a variation upon the peace offering, the variations making sense when you consider that the priests were not yet fully installed in their priestly office. In books like Leviticus, we are given fundamental templates for specific forms of sacrifices

and also see various forms of sacrifice joined together in particular ways for larger ceremonies such as the Day of Atonement. We also see deviations from the fundamental template could have been. occur in specific cases. We should be especially attentive on such occasions as the deviations are meaningful and also often illuminating of the underlying logic. The system is one that depends upon and develops associations between different levels of reality. There is an instructive analogy between the legitimate sacrifice and the legitimate priest, for instance, as the physical unblemished integrity of the animal is presented as a symbol of the moral integrity and ritual cleanness of the person. The sacrifice for the priest had to be a male without defects, and defects

that disqualified a priest would also disqualify a sacrifice, as we see in Leviticus chapter 21 and 22. As human life, society and relation was mapped onto and symbolically enacted with a system of animals, architecture, agriculture, seasons and ritual, Israel could make sense of itself through participation in the mirror of symbol and ritual. The sacrifices chiefly occurred within the order established by the tabernacle, a symbol of Sinai, the human body, the body politic, and the cosmos, as the various rooms and pieces of furniture of a house give shape and articulation to the different practices that occur within and around them.

So the different zones of the tabernacle and its furniture gives shape and articulation to various aspects of itineraries of approach to the Lord. The power of the sacrificial system is that as animals represented Israel and its various members, by performing sacrifice through symbolic substitutes, Israel could both represent and enact its own proper approach to God. The point of the rituals was always primarily as things to be performed, not primarily to be fodder for theologizing. The theology lay beneath the surface of the ritual texts and practices,

implicit in the logic of their performance, and tended to surface through close attention to their place in a system as it emerges through comparative study of many texts. As the rituals were performed, we should presume that the theological meaning of proper approach to God was internalized through their metaphorical forms. Even as moderns, we are not entirely alienated from symbol and ritual. A wedding is a good example of a symbolic ritual

that continues to play a powerful, if somewhat diminished, role in modern society. To go through the rigmarole of a wedding seems unnecessary to many. Surely all that matters is a man and a woman's personal intent to have a faithful lifelong union. And in exceptional cases, people can be considered as married without having gone through a ceremony or even in some jurisdictions without having registered their union. Yet the public ceremony, with its attendant rituals and symbols, is by no means unimportant. The public ceremony of the wedding plays out the greater transition that the joining of the couple represents, faithfully enacting and fully inhabiting the ceremonial drama is the means by which the real

transition can best be accomplished and made sense of. The symbol is how we grasp the reality. The ceremony is how we experience and enact its transitions. The reality is most fully and deeply encountered in the symbol. The purpose of the exchange of rings, for instance, is not to function as a symbolic picture, to convey ideas about a detached reality to your spectating mind. An attractive ring of gold and a precious stone is a fitting symbol of the beauty and the unique value of a wife to her husband, the strength and endurance of his love for her, and the bond and commitment that now exists between the pair upon the body itself. The ring itself isn't that love or bond, which could continue to exist even in its absence,

or in the case of its loss. However, the gift of the symbol is a means by which the reality itself is established, communicated, and known. The loss of a ring, even one of little monetary value, can be a cause of great sorrow, because something of the person's symbolic purchase upon the reality of their spouse's love for and commitment to them has been lost with it. A former husband's reclaiming of the ring he once gave could be a devastating breaking of a reality affected through symbolic action. All this applies to the sacrificial system.

The sacrifices were never mere pictures of theological concepts or of the nature of relationship with God, a sort of divinely instituted flannel graph. The sacrifices were the symbolic means by which the reality of relationship with God was experienced and known. Taking the sacrifices seriously and performing them, faithfully manifested the seriousness.

of the relationship with God that they enacted. The tabernacle was a symbolic building, but God was really present to and with his people there, and the structure of the building and its associated rituals provided frameworks within which the reality of people's relationship with God could be lived out. Hearing about the importance of symbol and ritual, and the way in which realities are affected through and encountered in them,

seems to many moderns, alienated as they are from the same, symbolic order to be a weirdly magical way of conceiving of the world, inappropriate for modern people, inappropriate also perhaps for Christians. In our scientific way of viewing the world, symbol and reality are not mutually constitutive. Rather, symbol is typically regarded as standing outside of reality as a signifying pointer to it. Entangling the two seemingly invites primitive and superstitious modes of thought. Symbol certainly isn't. magic, even though it is affectual. As Hebrews argues, the blood of bulls and ghosts could never take away sin. The tabernacle was always patterned after and a copy of a greater realm of the Lord's

presence and was never the true archetype. However, the objectivity of symbol and ritual is important to consider here. Symbols and rituals are not mere external expressions of private intentions. The sacrificial system was given by God as an objective means of approach to him, pre-existing any individual's intention to approach God in such a manner. The worshipper did not determine what the sacrifice meant or accomplished, but rather enacted the divinely established meaning and purpose, either faithfully or unfaithfully, as the rituals of sacrificial approach were objective God-given ways of drawing near to him. Although the sacrificial system was generally attended with a divine promise of efficacy, the prophets speak of the fairly. The

of sacrifice on account of wickedness and unbelief. Sacrifice was clearly not automatic. Rather, the efficacious practice of sacrifice presupposed the integrity of heart, ritual, and broader conduct. Where supposed worshippers were presenting sacrifices to the Lord, while their hearts were far from him, or while they were willfully persisting in impression of their neighbour, their offerings would not be accepted. We might regard sacrifice as a sort of enacted prayer following a divinely instituted pattern of approach. When performed in faith as a petition to the Lord for cleansing, forgiveness, access or communion, worshippers could be assured of the acceptance of their sacrifices.

Thank you very much for listening. If you'd like to read more of these reflections, you can do so on the Anchored Argosy, our free substack. If you would like to support this and other work that I do, you can do so using the Patreon or PayPal links below. God bless.