Lecture 17: Atonement, Azazel, and Strange Fire: The Questions Leviticus Raises

The lecture, section by section

1. Which tent of meeting?

   Leviticus opens with Yahweh calling to Moses from the tent of meeting, and the majority of interpreters are right: this is the tabernacle of Exodus 40, glory-filled, in the camp's center. It is not the earlier tent of Exodus 33, which Moses pitched far outside the camp after the golden calf, where the LORD spoke with him face to face as a man speaks to his friend. That distance was the fruit of covenant breach; forgiveness, renewal, and the tabernacle's construction changed the circumstances, and from Leviticus 1 onward God speaks from the midst of his people.

2. What atonement means

   The Hebrew verb behind make atonement has been explained as to cover, as to wipe away or purge, and as related to the word for ransom. Essex, with Wenham and Rooker, leans away from cover: the basic idea is cleansing, wiping away, which is why even the tabernacle and its vessels, objects, receive atonement. But when a person is atoned for, the cleansing rests on a substitute: a ransom paid, an offering accepted in the worshiper's place, God's wrath turned away. The Greek term that picks this up in the New Testament carries exactly that sense of propitiation. Cleansing, and the ransom beneath it, belong together.

3. Efficacious, and pointing beyond themselves

   Were the animal sacrifices effective? Yes: the text says atonement was made and the worshiper forgiven, wrath turned away. And the New Testament discloses why: their efficacy came because they represented and pointed toward the final sacrifice, Jesus Christ. Day by day, feast by feast, year by year, the system preached both the reality of forgiveness and its own insufficiency to finish the work.

4. Cut off from his people

   For certain offenses, from eating the peace offering unclean to refusing to humble oneself on the Day of Atonement, the sentence reads: that person shall be cut off from his people. This is not the death penalty, which the Torah states plainly when it means it, nor chiefly an act of community excommunication. Some of these offenses are attitudes of the heart that only the LORD can see. Best understood, the cutting off is what God does: the offender passes from blessing under a divine curse, whose outworking, perhaps childlessness, perhaps premature death, perhaps judgments unseen, is left in God's hands. Even secret sin answers to God.

5. Strange fire: what Nadab and Abihu did

   Fresh from their installation, two of Aaron's four sons took their firepans and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded, and fire from the LORD consumed them. The stated offense is the fire itself, coals not taken as commanded. But the context adds dimensions: immediately afterward the LORD forbids Aaron and his sons wine or strong drink when entering the tent of meeting, lest you die, suggesting judgment dulled by drink; and Leviticus 16 opens by recalling that the two died when they approached the presence of the LORD, implying they carried their fire toward the most holy place itself. Wrong fire, wrong time, wrong place, and the wrong men, for even the high priest could enter within the veil only one day a year.

6. The weight of being set apart

   The lesson lands on everyone consecrated to God's service: the priests were set apart, no longer common, and their responsibility rose with their nearness. Pastors are shepherds, not Aaronic priests, but the principle holds in both Testaments: those set apart for God's service answer to a higher accountability, and sober judgment, never doing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place, is part of the calling.

7. Why these animals?

   For the food laws of Leviticus 11, Essex weighs the usual proposals. That unclean animals were the ones pagans sacrificed fails, because the nations sacrificed clean animals too. That the laws were ancient hygiene fails, because Acts 10 declared all foods clean long before refrigeration changed anything. The best account is the one Leviticus itself gives: distinction. Clean and unclean, a division older than Sinai, for Noah already knew it, became in Israel's diet a daily enactment of the difference between the holy nation and the Gentiles, its inner rationale finally known to God alone, and its purpose ended when Acts 10 dissolved the distinction it served.

8. Azazel and the goat of removal

   The goat sent away on the Day of Atonement goes, in the Hebrew, to or as Azazel, and interpreters have taken that as a proper name, a name for the wilderness, or a meaningful term. Essex stars the last: the goat of removal, the goat that departs, bearing the confessed sins of Israel into the wilderness to die there, the death that sin deserved. Some defend Azazel as a proper name, but the notion that a ransom was somehow paid to a demon outside the camp collides with everything the chapter teaches; even Keil and Delitzsch read it as the departing goat. Our English word scapegoat, inherited from the early translators, is itself a small interpretation, and a sound one.

9. Why bring a freewill burnt offering?

   A student asks: if the burnt offering atones, why is it voluntary? Because it answers not a particular act but a condition. The worshiper who has dealt with a sin through the sin and guilt offerings still knows something deeper: I sin because I am a sinner. The burnt offering confesses that estate and reconsecrates the whole person to Yahweh, which is why Noah, personally faithful, still offered burnt offerings after the flood. And the freewill offerings assume a clear ledger: known sin must be dealt with first; then the worshiper stands free to bring his freewill gifts.

10. A day that only looks back

    The Day of Atonement gathered up the previous year, all the sins of Israel cumulatively, and anticipated nothing forward. The Israelite left it clean and walked into the new year by faith, trusting that the God who provided atonement would provide it again. Essex presses the continuity: the Old Testament saint lived by faith toward a provision still future, and the New Testament saint lives by faith resting on a provision accomplished, both walking by faith and not yet by sight, until faith becomes sight in the presence of God.

11. You will preach Leviticus through Hebrews

    Few pastors announce an exposition of Leviticus early in ministry, but every pastor who preaches Hebrews will preach Leviticus: the priesthood and sacrifice chapters of Hebrews cannot be explained without it, and many an expositor has paused there to give his people the Old Testament system whole, its correspondences with Christ and its differences from him.

12. The woman who reversed Leviticus

    The session ends with a student's question about the woman of Mark 5, unclean for years with an issue of blood. Under Leviticus, her touch defiled whatever it met; to reach for the Holy One was an audacious act of faith. And then the reversal: instead of her uncleanness passing to Jesus, his holiness passed to her, the flow dried up at the touch. The same reversal stands in Mark 1, where Jesus touches a leper and the leper becomes clean. Anyone who knows Leviticus knows what those miracles assert: here is the one, and the only one, who overcomes uncleanness itself. Knowing the Old Testament is how the New Testament comes into focus.

1. Cleansing rests on a ransom: forgiveness is free to the worshiper but never costless. How does holding both truths together deepen the way you confess sin and receive grace?

2. Nadab and Abihu teach that nearness to God raises accountability rather than relaxing it. Where has familiarity with holy things tempted you toward carelessness, and what does sober reverence look like in practice?

3. Under Leviticus the unclean defiled whatever it touched; in Mark, Jesus' touch makes the unclean clean. What does that reversal mean for how you bring your own uncleanness to him, and for whom you are willing to touch?