Thread by @JoelBaden

#Leviticus 18:24-30

Defiling the land

Some sins defile the sanctuary - the kinds of ritual sins we met in Lev 1-15, along with impurities - but some sins, like those in this chapter, defile the land itself. And while you can purify the sanctuary…not so much the land.

There’s only one way for the land to be cleansed: the removal of the people whose behavior has defiled it. (And, crucially, defiled the people themselves, too - unlike what we saw in Lev 1-15.) That’s the land “spewing out” its inhabitants.

That’s what H says happened to the previous inhabitants, the Canaanites, who acted in all these abhorrent ways. (But we know that they actually didn’t, right? It’s just a nasty polemic.)

What we have here is a new threat, one that the original P text didn’t have in mind. For P, the threat was YHWH leaving the sanctuary. For H, it’s exile.

Nota bene: texts that threaten exile aren’t necessarily written in an exilic or post-exilic context. Exile was a threat long before the Babylonians. All someone in Judah needed to do was look north to recognize what the worst outcome would look like.

But what we may see here is a sense that the purely ritual concerns and dangers presented by P were insufficient to reflect the potential geopolitical realities. Exile was happening - but P makes no allowance for it. H does - not by disagreeing with P, but by expanding on it.

As we see all over the Bible - particularly in the prophets - new realities on the ground require new theologies. That’s not a failing, either then or now. It’s the standard way that texts written in one context are updated and interpreted for a new one. We do the same.