Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 45 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course reaches the part of the Torah Christians hurry past and Jewish readers treasure most. Dr. Essex argues that Leviticus is misnamed twice over: it is not chiefly about Levites, and it is not chiefly about rules. It is about a fact visible from every tent in the camp: Yahweh himself dwelling in Israel's midst, a blessing and a danger at once. Listen for why nothing in Leviticus is given to gain God's presence, and for the four categories an Israelite's life depended on keeping straight.
The Hebrew title is the book's first words, And He Called, Yahweh calling Moses and speaking from the tent of meeting, and it names the book truly: Leviticus is more purely the recorded speech of the Lord than any other book in the Bible. Set in red letters, it would out-red the Gospels, long addresses from Yahweh with only slivers of narrative between. The Greek title, Leviticus, a book pertaining to the Levites, misleads: the refrain from chapter 1 to chapter 27 is speak to the sons of Israel. This is Yahweh's word to the whole nation.
Exodus ends with the tabernacle erected on the first day of the first month of the second year, and Numbers opens with the census on the first day of the second month of that year, so the whole of Leviticus occupies about thirty days, at most the fifty until Israel breaks camp. The narrative that telescoped centuries now slows to a crawl: twenty-seven chapters for one month. The Spirit's own pacing declares that these days matter.
Christian interpretation has always gravitated to Genesis, whose opening chapters concern all mankind and whose Abraham is the father of faith to every Gentile believer through Romans 4 and Galatians 3. Jewish interpretation gravitates to Leviticus; in a Jewish institution, a Torah course would begin at Leviticus 1:1 and branch outward. After the temple fell in AD 70, with priesthood and sacrifice impossible, and no one able to establish their tribe though Revelation 7 shows God has not lost track, Jewish reading of Leviticus turned increasingly allegorical, the Day of Atonement becoming a matter of afflicting the soul. Only in the last century have both Jewish and Christian scholarship, the latter shedding its own excess typology, returned to asking first what Leviticus meant to Israel on the plains of Moab, and only then what follows for readers now.
Ask for the major theme of Leviticus and nearly everyone answers holiness, and the root is indeed there some hundred and fifty times. But Essex, persuaded by Richard Averbeck's work on the theology of Leviticus, sets a theme beneath it: the presence of Yahweh. Exodus closes with the glory of the LORD filling the tabernacle, cloud by day and fire by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel; every tent in the camp, however far out, could look toward the center and see the visible token of God dwelling in their midst. Leviticus answers the question that reality creates: how does a people live with Yahweh present among them?
Yahweh's presence is the great blessing of Israel's life and, for the unfaithful, its greatest danger; the same nearness that delights the obedient brought disaster on the disobedient. And the book's logic must be kept in order: nothing in Leviticus is given so that Israel might obtain God's presence. He is already there, by his own redeeming act. Everything in Leviticus is given so that Israel might enjoy and maintain the relationship Yahweh established.
The first seventeen chapters govern approach: the offerings, brought before Yahweh, offered as he commanded so the worshiper may be accepted before him. From chapter 18 the addresses turn to daily life, framed by the drumbeat I am Yahweh your God: you shall, you shall not. The Israelite comes to the tabernacle knowing he comes to Yahweh, and leaves the tabernacle without ever leaving Yahweh's presence, the cloud visible over his shoulder, the holy God watching how his people live.
The root idea of holiness is separateness, distinctness. Yahweh is holy: unique among the gods, distinct from his creation, and distinct from the sin that permeates mankind, including his own people. Because he is holy, the people who bear his name must be distinct, and that is the answer Leviticus itself gives for many of its requirements. Why these foods and not those? For I am Yahweh who brought you up from Egypt to be your God; you shall be holy, for I am holy.
Some of Israel's required distinctions visibly track God's creation pattern: the abominations of chapters 18 through 20 set Israel against practices, from idolatry to immorality, that cut against the order God made. Others, mixed cloth, foods later released in Acts 10, carry no stated rationale beyond the holiness of Yahweh: this is the way it is, because you are my holy people. Either way the effect was the same: everything an Israelite wore and ate could prompt a Gentile's question, why do you live this way, and the answer was always the same, because Yahweh is my God. Essex calls it evangelism Old Testament style: a life so distinct the nations have to ask.
Things could be holy, persons could be holy, and times were holy: Leviticus 23 lists Yahweh's appointed times to be proclaimed as holy convocations, beginning with the weekly Sabbath and moving through the feasts. On such days ordinary work was set aside so the mind could be set on Yahweh, who he is and what he has done, and at the feast of booths in the sabbatical year the Torah itself was read whole, as Deuteronomy 31 commands. Israel's calendar was built to keep the nation remembering.
The book's working categories form a ladder. Over against the holy stands the common, and the common divides into clean and unclean. The clean can be consecrated and made holy, fit for contact with God; the clean can also be polluted into uncleanness, and the unclean can never touch the holy until it is first cleansed. To profane is to drag the holy down into the common, and to treat Yahweh like any other god is to profane his name. Grisanti's chart in The World and the Word lays out the whole system with its arrows of movement in both directions.
Some uncleanness involves no sin at all. A woman who gives birth is unclean for a season, though childbirth is God's own creation blessing, the very means of being fruitful and multiplying. Why then unclean? Because in a fallen world even the blessing is touched by the fall: every child born is another sinner entering the world, and the ordinance kept Israel mindful that all of life now stands at a distance from what God made it to be, and needs cleansing before consecration. The stakes were not theoretical: in Leviticus 10 what was not sanctified was brought into Yahweh's presence, with fatal results, and in that very chapter the priests are charged to distinguish between the holy and the profane, the unclean and the clean. In a camp where God dwells, those categories are life and death.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why is And He Called a truer title than Leviticus?
2. How long a period do the twenty-seven chapters of Leviticus cover?
3. Where would a Torah course in a Jewish institution begin?
4. What drove post-AD 70 Jewish interpretation of Leviticus toward allegory?
5. What does Essex identify as the theme beneath holiness in Leviticus?
6. In what sense was Yahweh's presence both blessing and danger?
7. What is nothing in Leviticus given to do?
8. What is the root idea of holiness?
9. What answer does Leviticus itself give for distinctions with no stated rationale?
10. What did Israel's distinct food and dress accomplish among the nations?
11. What happens to ordinary work on the holy convocations of Leviticus 23?
12. How do the categories of Leviticus fit together?
13. Why is a new mother unclean though childbirth is God's blessing?
14. What does Leviticus 10 show about the book's categories?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 14 is complete.
Every Israelite could look toward the center of the camp and see the sign of God's presence. What practices serve that function for a believer now, keeping the reality of God's nearness in view through ordinary days?
Nothing in Leviticus obtains God's presence; everything maintains the relationship he established. How does that same order, grace first, then obedience, keep a Christian's devotion from turning into earning?
Israel's distinctness was designed to make the nations ask why. Where should a Christian's life be countercultural enough today to prompt that question, and how ready are you with the answer?
The charge at the center of Leviticus 19: you shall be holy, for I, Yahweh your God, am holy.
The lecture's own trail: Richard Averbeck's study of the theology of Leviticus, the work that persuaded Essex to set the presence of Yahweh beneath holiness; John Hartley's Leviticus commentary, with its extensive survey of Jewish and Christian interpretation; and Grisanti's chart of the holy, the common, the clean, and the unclean in The World and the Word.