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Joel Baden

@JoelBaden

1 Oct

#Leviticus 19:26-28

Sorcery (and why Jews wear beards and don’t get tattoos)

The thing about sorcery in the Bible is that it isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil. It isn’t forbidden because it’s “magic” (however defined). It’s forbidden because it works.

Sorcery (or divination, or augury, or whatever in this concept cluster) is problematic because it usurps YHWH’s power - and, particularly, the authority of the priests as the sole access to YHWH, and especially to oracular knowledge. Knowledge is power, don’t you know.

Sorcery is thus very much like child sacrifice - prohibited because of its efficaciousness, because it overrides or usurps divine authority, because it reveals alternative modes of manipulating power and knowledge. Such things are, as always, a threat to the powers that be.

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Joel Baden

@JoelBaden

30 Sep

#Leviticus 19:23-25

Forbidden fruit

Sorry - not as sexy as it sounds. Like, literal forbidden fruit: no fruit from trees less than four years old can be eaten. Fine agricultural practice I’m sure - more interesting is the word for “forbidden” here: elsewhere, “uncircumcised.”

Same word used in both cases of literal circumcision (like Abraham in Gen 17) and some famous figurative language: Moses talking about his mouth, Jeremiah about people’s hearts and ears, etc.

I’m here to suggest that “uncircumcised” isn’t the base meaning of the word, but is a specialized (if common) application of a broader term meaning “covered, blocked.” Moses’s mouth, Jeremiah’s hearts and ears…and of course these premature fruit trees.

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Joel Baden

@JoelBaden

28 Sep

#Leviticus 19:19

Forbidden mixtures

Goats and sheep, corn and peas, wool and cotton: whatever you do, don’t mix them together. After the most beloved law in the Bible comes this, one of the most often ignored, even disdained. But remember: they’re equally biblical.

This law may be hard to understand on a practical level, but it’s pretty consistent with the overall priestly concern for categories and boundaries and definitions. Creation was an act of separation: don’t undo it by muddling everything back together.

This is of course especially important for animal breeding, since animal categories are crucial for both the sacrificial system and the kosher laws. When everything means something, then it’s important to know what everything is, categorically.

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Joel Baden

@JoelBaden

27 Sep

#Leviticus 19:9-18

Holiness laws, part 2

Here's a pretty terrific collection of ethical laws, in no obvious order, and many of them borrowed from other texts. It's like a greatest hits of ethical legal statements. And, oh yeah, it culminates with the golden rule.

It's probably worth saying that the golden rule is known as such only because of Jesus (or, for my Jews, Hillel). There's nothing in H, or anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, to denote it as any more special or important than any other law.

Is it more special? It's certainly broader, and in that sense more useful. But it doesn't override any others - or if it does, that's an interpretive choice, not one dictated by the Bible itself. In an alternate universe, another law could have become "the golden rule."

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Joel Baden

@JoelBaden

25 Sep

#Leviticus 19:3-8

Holiness laws, part 1

This collection starts with what looks like a nod to the Decalogue: honoring parents, sabbath, no idols. And it’s not impossible that that’s what this is, since one of the differences between H and P is that H knows and reacts to D.

But it isn’t the same. The part about parents is different: not honor, כבד, which I argued earlier was about caring for ancestral graves, but respect, ירא. This chapter comes between the sex laws, which seems relevant. Also in H we get the law against insulting parents, Lev 20:9.

H, in other words, seems to mean here what everyone usually thinks the Decalogue means: respect your parents, during their lifetimes. H cares about this from various angles. And maybe(?) it signals a temporal shift coinciding with the fading of the ancestral cult. Maybe.

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Joel Baden

@JoelBaden

23 Sep

#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.)

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