Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 26:14, Farewell Leviticus

Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Leviticus 26:14, Farewell Leviticus | 02.21.24

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- And now we turn to the final chapter of the book of Leviticus. Leviticus has not been an easy book to deal with and the end is even more problematic, but at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel because next week, or maybe at the end of this week, we’ll start the third book, the fourth book of the Bible, so-called numbers, but if you remember we left off last week with the blessings that were declared and given in the beginning of chapter 26 to the people, if they obeyed the laws and the rules and if they accepted divine authority. And of course we have the problem of this promise of everything bountiful and beautiful and magnificent that’s going to happen to us if we are good. And today we’re going to read about all the horrible things that happen to us if we are bad. And you will notice that whereas talking about the good things, there are basically 13 verses, whereas talking about the bad things, we go on and on and on for 40 verses almost.

Why is it that all the terrible things that are going to happen sound so much worse than the good things that are going to happen? And how are we supposed to understand this? Are we supposed to understand this theologically in the sense that God guarantees that if we behave things will be wonderful and yet it’s clear and obvious to everybody that good people suffer and that there seems to be no logical connection between being God-fearing or good and everything going well, particularly not in the physical world is any guarantee that the rains will come if I’m good. And yet this was the normal way of thinking and talking 3000 years ago. In all of the civilizations that have left a trace for us in some form of writing or engraving or communication, we have this same, same recurring theme that when the monarch is appointed, everybody has to come down and bow down to him and pledge loyalty to him or her occasionally. And this involves a two-way contract.

A contract in which the king promises to take care and the people promise to obey and think about it, it wasn’t really until Hobbes, the English philosopher writing some 500 years ago who challenged the idea first of all, of the divine right of kings, that kings and monarchs were the representative of God on earth and therefore spoke in God terms to their citizens, could cure them. Even to this day there is a lot of people believe that royal figures can touch and heal and somehow cure in one form or another and other people too. So this idea of obedience and on the other hand the threat that things will go wrong was an inevitable part of the way the ancient world thought. And this is obviously a book produced within the ancient world. Now whether we then nowadays rationally can explain this is a challenge. One way of resolving a challenge is to say there is a difference between talking to individuals, you as an individual as opposed to a nation. That all of this is addressed to the nation when the nation as a whole strays, the nation will suffer. And of course we know as we look through history that declines and falls are usually the result of things going fundamentally wrong within a particular society.

Societies start and they rise and they’re full of hope and expectation and great ideals, but in effect, they all at some stage or another seem to collapse. And the amazing thing is that Judaism has gone through more of these rises and falls than any other and has survived for so long. Does that indicate in some way God’s intervention? Rather, I think, it should be seen in terms of saying that there are good ways to behave and bad ways to behave both for individuals and for a society. And if a society is to really flourish, there are certain ethical things it has to take on board, certain concern for its citizens, a certain standard of law and a standard of justice and a standard of what we would call equity. But that introduction giving, this I like to look at in a form of poetry. And the language and the words that are used in what we’re about to talk and read are very different to any other block of language in the Torah. This is a unique statement. It is described as the rebuke, the and when it is read from the Torah, it is read very quickly in hush tones because of the awesome warning that’s given. That terrible things will happen. Which in one way you might say, there’s a very modern message.

So I would like to start with verse 14 and verse 14 goes like this and I’m going to read it in the Hebrew as well as try to give my interpretation of it in the English because the Hebrew poetry is so magnificent, it’s so overpowering that it’s a shame if one can’t hear it, at least in the original language. And so verse 14 starts off like this. If you don’t listen to me. And do not do all these things that I’ve commanded you to do. If you reject, if you spurn my laws. If your souls are revolted at what commandments I give and you cannot accept my laws. To annul, to deny your covenant with me, verse 16. I, the king, or God, I am going to pay you back. I will make sure you are visited with misery, confusion, diseases that affect your skull, your brain, your mind will go. Your eyes will be sick and unable to see From the pain of your soul, from what you’ll be going through. And when you sow your seed to plant food, your enemies will eat it up completely and you will not benefit it from it at all. So this is condition, not just that you fail to do the law.

It doesn’t say that you fail ‘cause we all fail. It says if you reject, if the whole idea revolts you, if the idea of being Jewish and adhering to Jewish law turns you off so much you wish to have nothing to do with it, it disgusts you. And there are people who do feel that way and have felt that way in the past and particularly in the generation that experienced the Holocaust. So I am going to pay you back if you really reject me. I will turn, in verse 17, my face is towards you And you will be plagued by your enemies, your enemies will totally make life hell for you. You will flee from them. Even when nobody’s pursuing you. You will be so lacking in confidence that you will imagine worse things are going to happen. And if after that initial statement, this initial warning to you, , you don’t listen to me even then after the warning, I will continue to discipline you seven times for your sins. And notice that repetition of seven, seven times coming through here. I will destroy your arrogance. You are overconfident, you think you can control everything. You think you are in charge. You think you’ve got the perfect security system.

But I will respond by turning the skies to iron and your earth like copper or brass. In other words they will turn against you too. And your strength will all be wasted on nothing. You’ll try and get nowhere. And the earth will not produce anything for you. And the trees of the earth, will not give the fruit. Verse 21, carry, this strange word carry from, it really is linked very often to a disease in which the blood flows and doesn’t stop. But it also can mean enmity. If you continue to be opposed to me , not to listen to me, I will add, seven times for whatever you do and the beast of the field will swarm against you and they will consume you and your animals and your cattle and they will take your children away from you and they will reduce you, reduce, shrink you. And the paths you take Will be abandoned, nobody will follow you. And if despite all this, you won’t control yourself for me and you rebel against me, you hate me, I will hate you back. And again, we’ll go back seven times And I will send a sword against you which will revenge you and avenge the covenant that you betrayed.

You will gather into your cities because you are frightened. But there you’ll be smitten with plagues as you crowding on each other, you’ll be delivered over to your enemies. Verse 26 I will prevent there being any bread for you. 10 women will try to bake bread in one oven. , come out with a little bit of weight and even that you will eat, you will not be satisfied. If you still don’t listen to me, you still rebel against me. I will go with twice as much anger back to you and I will continue to strike you, discipline you, seven times for your sins. Look how often , seven times. seven is the day of rest and of the good and positive. And can be turned around to be something horrible that’s going to happen to you. I will destroy all your high places, all your idolatrous buildings, all the things you do that celebrate the opposite of ethics and good behaviour. And I will cut down all the tools that you use to pursue your idolatrous way of life. And your carcasses will be heaped upon each other. And I will be revolted by you. And it carries on and I will make all your cities ruined And I will destroy your holy places.

I will no longer smell the sweet smell of incense from your hypocritical worship. I will destroy the earth. and your enemies will be amazed at how you allow this all to happen. 33, and then I will scatter you throughout all the nations of the world. And wherever you go, the sword will pursue you. Your cities will be destroyed, your land will be destroyed, your cities will be destroyed too. So here again we have this threat of exile and of punishment in exile 34. And then the earth will no longer enjoy the rest that you gave it. That is to say abiding by the laws of restricting your use of the land to enable it to recover. And you meanwhile will be in the land of your enemies. The land will rest and two ways of understanding it, the English translation talks about then shall the land rest and make up for its Sabbath. But here we’re still talking about what’s going wrong during this period when you won’t be keeping the Sabbath, neither you nor the land and therefore you in a sense will not just be rested in a positive sense, but basically you’ll be removed.

Throughout this time of desolation, the land will be in this state of not being productive, of resting but in a negative sense into resting in a positive sense. Because you did not keep the sabbaths while you were on the land. Those people who survive, verse 36. Those people who are left, I will make them frightened, constantly scared. in the lands of their enemies where they will be oppressed. And the sound even of a leaf floating through the air, so terrify them, and once again they will rush away to escape from fear even though nobody’s actually following. Verse 37, and one fellow will pursue the other, you’ll be fighting each other, there’ll be civil war. But meanwhile, nobody’s attacking you. You’ll never be able to stand before your enemies. And when you listen to this, you think through history of those occasions when this actually did happen, this was going on. You will disappear, you will assimilate into the nations of the world. They will absorb you. They will eat you in the lands of your enemies. 39 And those of you who are left will be sick as a result of what terrible things they’ve done in their enemies lands. and they will even be sick because of what their forefathers did.

Because they let this happen, they initiated it. They already began to decline and influence you. And there will be a time when they will confess that not only did they do the wrong thing, but the parents did the wrong thing. But by rejecting me because they abandoned me. Verse 41 and so I’m going to carry on, you don’t want me, I don’t want you. And I will lead them continually into the lands of their enemies. And then their heart will be uncircumcised in the sense that they will not be following the traditions that I expect them to do. But then maybe there’s a chance that they may suddenly realise that they can come back from this terrible state. And therefore what I’m saying is that no matter how terrible things are going to be, no matter what exile you are going to have, no matter how much you suffer as a people in verse 42 , after all this suffering, there is hope. I will remember the covenant of Jacob. Even the covenant of Isaac, The covenant of Abraham I will remember, and I will remember the land and I will give you an opportunity again of seeing if this time you can do a better job altogether.

Verse 43 And all of a sudden the land could be what it was providing they remembered and accepted that they’d done wrong. But if they keep on going on and they ignore my laws and they still reject me, in verse 44, despite that, even if they don’t totally come back to me be when they’re in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them. I won’t be revolted by them to destroy them, but I will not abandon my covenant with them because I am the Lord your God. So having said all these terrible things, all these horrible things about what’s going to happen, it goes on to say in verse 45, I will remember the covenant I made with those earlier people who followed me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I shall teach you land of Egypt in front of everybody. To be a God. I am God. Wow, so these verses of how terrible things are going to happen, is going to be repeated again later on. So it’s not only once, but it sounds horrible and one really wonders why it’s here in the Torah with all the positive things and all the good things that are mentioned. And again, I think one has to understand this in terms of saying that we have it within our power to create a good state, a good nation, a good people, to be good people ourselves. And if we fail to do this, then we will reap the consequences.

Now you are bound to ask, can we apply this now in our day and age? And there are people who do and there are people who say, look, the Jewish people numerically speaking, most of them have abandoned Jewish practise. Jewish practise is something that is adhered to only to a minority amongst the Jews. It doesn’t mean to say a lot of Jews who don’t practise aren’t very good people or are not very much involved in the world. But this is a book which is talking about the importance of ethics in a world at the time where everything around them was corrupt. And in one sense we can say that we live at this moment in a time when although there is so much good in the world, there’s also so much bad in the world. But this statement I think is a statement for the people as a people rather than as individuals. And my justification in saying that is that this last chapter of the book of Leviticus talks about something which in its way also seems very, very difficult to understand. It’s what’s called this, the value. The value of a person. How do you judge the value of a person? And initially this was a way of dedicating something to the temple rather than a sacrifice.

So you would say, I don’t want to give a temple sacrifice, I don’t want to do these things if I don’t have to, but I want somehow to contribute to make a charitable donation. And the charitable donation is the equivalent of me. I want to give my equivalent as a donation to the temple or to the community. So the question is how then do we value my, shall we say charitable donation? And this value is what is controversial and we will need to explain. So in verse chapter 27 verse one, God says to Moses, , a person. And although it says an ish, which again you think it’s a man, but we are going to apply to women as well. If somebody makes a vow and the vow is , the value of a soul, to God. Now you can’t evaluate a soul, you can’t evaluate a mind. But what can you evaluate? Actually what’s interesting is that in American society and in most other societies, when one is evaluating damages, the damages that one evaluates is the amount of money a person could have earned had that person not been killed, for example. So here we’re going to say that in verse three, the value of a male between the years of 20 and between 60, his value will be 50 shekels worth.

In the holy shekel, that means to say the shekel that was fixed by the temple bankers as opposed to the value of the coin elsewhere or in different currencies or different systems. But if it’s a woman who’s donating, then the value for the same age will be 30. Now does that mean that the men are worth twice as much as the women? Well intellectually, of course we know now it’s probably the reverse, but what could they be talking about? The only thing theoretically they could be talking about is the amount of money they are able to earn. Now bear in mind we think that above 60, a person is an elder , has to be treated with enormous respect. The only difference is that as they get older, they get weaker. In the same way somebody under the age of 20 hasn’t yet reached the full physical strength. So person can earn but not the same. And verse five, in the period between five years old and 20 years, the male’s value is down to 20 and the female’s value is down to 10. And then from one month until five years, the value of the male is five five, three. And if you are getting older and you are male, your value is 15 and the female is 10.

And if a person cannot afford to pay what he promised he appears before the priest and the priest will make an assessment, whatever the person can afford, this is how the priest is going to value. In nine, And if it offers an animal as an offering to God, that which he offers then becomes holy, part of the property of the priesthood dedicated to God. And you have choices as to what you want to do with it. Either kill it or breed it or use it in whatever. But 10, once you’ve dedicated something, you can’t swap it. Oh, have regret, I don’t want to give this one. I’d rather give that. both ways. You can’t go from an expensive one you originally gave you want back again or to a cheap one you originally gave you want to upgrade. And if you do substitute one thing for another, then they both become holy, not you reduce one instead. And similarly, if it’s an animal that can’t be part of the sacrificial system, once again it’s offered to the priest to evaluate it.

He evaluates it, whether good or bad. And then you can use it again if it’s a sort of a draught animal of some kind or a camel or a pig And if on the other hand he does want to redeem it, you can get it back, but you have to add a fine of a fifth. And then a similar thing happens if you want to give, donate your house in verse 14, Dedicate his house, The priest values it, whatever is good value, high or low. And that’s what the value is and that’s what he gives. But if he wants to get his house back again, he has to add a fifth as a kind of a fine, a penalty. And if a person also gives part of property and that he dedicates to the temple, once again there is a value that’s made on it. And in addition to that, there is some grain that has to be added. And if the land is consecrated to the period of the jubilee, that’s what its value is. After the jubilee, so we’ve got another 50 years to run. You add the value, you redeem it according to the value. And if on the other hand that field is redeemed, then there is a kind of a penalty to be given. And this goes through this whole lot of rules and laws about redeeming something when you dedicate it to the temple. Now why do I say that this is interesting?

Because having talked about the destruction of the nation and how the nation is going to suffer and what happens when things go wrong, the Torah focuses on something which brings us back to the individual and the value of the individual. How much is an individual worth? Now there are many ways of judging what an individual’s worth is, intellectual, physical, practical. But whereas it’s almost impossible to really evaluate the degree of value, you can say how many degrees does somebody have? If you have a BA, you are worth so much, an MA, you are so much, a PhD, you worth so much. In one way that is only reflected in terms of how much you can earn. It’s not reflected in how much you are valued by other people, but it is your ability to achieve a certain amount in the purely physical area. And that is usually based on the amount of work that you can achieve. What is your value, so to speak in the market, in the labour market? Now nobody suggests that this is a religious value, a spiritual value, or that it makes somebody better than anybody else. Because as you can see, your value rises as your physical strength rises and it declines as your strength declines.

I think nowadays, if this were being written, probably there wouldn’t be a distinction between male and female. If anything, possibly it might reverse the priorities. But that’s how the world functioned at that stage. And this is where we come to the end of the book of Leviticus and the book of Leviticus, which is often called the idea of the priestly book, even though there’s no indication in the tradition that that’s the title that should be given to this area, but later on it is called , the laws of the Priests. It is something that is very, very inapplicable if you take it literally in the world in which we live today. And yet if you peel away the surface and if you look at what lies beneath the surface, you can see that what the Torah is trying to do is to give a pattern for behaviour of individuals in their personal life, in their private life, in their ethical life of structures for the community, community worship, community responsibility with an emphasis both on community and the individual. And combining these two together in a situation in which one is expected to think about one’s actions.

Nowadays the Jewish world has changed. We no longer have temples or in the biblical sense, we no longer have laws of purity and impurity. We have in one way switched to a tradition based on study Torah and the community synagogue, which really originally was just the study house because prayer is something that you could do privately wherever you are. But these things have evolved and you can therefore see the evolution of the Jewish tradition from these earlier chapters, these chapters of Leviticus that are in the main, much of it, certainly not the ethical, ethical stands just as much as any now as it ever did, but much of the ritual is not relevant. So we could look at this as a historical record of how things were. We could also look at this in terms of what lessons can we learn that are applicable to us in this day and age. So this is where we end the book of Leviticus. And when whenever we end a book and we come to the end of the chapter, the tradition when we finish the book is to say the last line, be strong, be strong.

Let us be strong and enable us to go on to read the next book or to enable us to go along and survive on the basis of doing what we’re expected to do. The next book we’re going to study is going to be the book that’s called Numbers. And it’s called Numbers because it’s going to start off with a census. But in fact the Hebrew word for it is in the wilderness. Because the narrative up to now has taken us through the first year of coming out of Egypt. All that we’ve done has been dictated or if you like, applied to the first year of the Exodus. In , we’re coming to the preparation for the invasion of Canaan and the narratives of the crucial events in the 40 year period between being turned back again and 40 years later when they come towards the land of Canaan. So with that, we will pause and open up the questions to see what we have.

Q&A and Comments

So Romaine says it’s punitive in style and content. Yes it is, it is punitive, it is uncomfortable. But just think in terms of discipline. There are so many different ways of disciplining children or disciplining adults. As adults, we still feel differently if there’s a policeman around or if there’s somebody watching us. And sometimes we have to worry about the consequences. And when we think about the consequences that makes us, if you like, called back or withdraw to reconsider. So if you think of this in terms of punishment, you know when I was a young boy, punishment was the cane. You were taken a bamboo stick and wapped over your bottom, and later on you are punished by being hit over the bottom with a slipper and sometimes you had your ears tweaked or your nose pinched, or a teacher would throw the blackboard duster at your head or a piece of chalk at your head. And in still companies today, very often children are smacked and physically punished in Madrasahs and in Haidas and in other places like that. So bear in mind that until recently, discipline and punishment were considered to be a necessary requirement for education. And if you put it in that context, that it was part of the educational process as they understood it and they didn’t understand the way we understand it now. And we to some extent have gone too far the other way.

Now I’m not saying for one minute we should bring back corporal punishment. I’m strongly opposed to corporal punishment, very, very strongly opposed to it, as I am to capital punishment. But nevertheless, I think we’ve gone too far in not wanting to discipline and I think we are seeing the result of this in the behaviour of so many people who are unable to accept discipline, who don’t like setbacks, who don’t like being told no. And so I think it’s fair to argue that we’ve gone too far in the other direction and maybe this is one of the reasons why our societies are in such a mess today. Having said that, when I look at those societies which impose much stricter punishment and are, if you like, rigid dictatorships, I certainly don’t think we want to go back to that.

Q: So Brian then says, “What do the commentators say about the difference between the covenant in chapter 26 and the contract of faith and the financial contract described in chapter 27?” A: Well I think to reiterate what I said, I think that up to now everything has been said about you, the people, this is what you, the people have to do, this is what the state should be. But on the other hand, I think it’s fair to say we’re not paying enough attention to the individual and to realise that it’s the individual that makes choices and we have to focus on the individual as much as we do on the state. And so this idea of going back to valuing the individual in one form or another symbolically is another way of saying, but remember it’s up to every one of you individually as to whether we fall into this disaster of the failure or whether we are able to create a society, which is a just and fair one that we want to live in.

Philip says, “The sounds like an atomic fallout in our present day. It sounds pretty catastrophic.” I certainly agree with you that it does. Carla, thank you very much. Richard Culker, you’ll eat the flesh of your sons and daughters, but never in Judaism. Well, you know what this is saying is that sometimes famine has been so horrific and there’ve been situations where humans have resorted to cannibalism, that is about as low as you can get. But sometimes when things get so bad, this is what happens. And it is again, an indication of how low it’s possible for a society to descend towards.

Shelly, “It’s hard to think about why you should be punished for not following the laws that don’t seem to have a reason behind them, like for example, which is the mixing of different cloths.” Of course, Solomon got into trouble for thinking he could ignore the laws because he wasn’t violating the reasons behind them, although in fact he was. But I don’t think we should be talking in terms of punishment on the way we treat it as being individuals, as explaining why societies decline and fail and getting us to see if possibly we have contributed to this failure. But all of this is intended primarily to get us to think. Now, if there are, for example, laws in the Torah that don’t appear to make sense, this is a challenge. Who says we understand what sense is? Who says that one person’s common sense is another person’s idiocy? There has to be at some stage an agreement to accept a certain tradition or a certain culture or many laws that, for example, there are laws in the United States of America today and in New York that I think are ridiculous, that do not make sense, that are indeed, I would say corrupt and yet if I live in this society, I have to abide by those laws. So if that’s true in this world in which we’re living now, thousands of years later, why shouldn’t it be true of something going back then?

Q: Anisael says, “Thank you for the interpretation. What do you think could be the equivalent of the today?” A: Well, I think the today is precisely what we are hearing when we listen to the candidates for presidency or for political power in this country. Everybody is telling you, if you don’t vote for me, this is the end of the country. If you do vote for me, I’m going to put everything right. Things haven’t changed and this is how human beings are. We respond to the carrot and the stick and everybody thinks they know what is best. But in the end it is a constitution and an objective constitution, which is as close as you can get to a safeguard. But even that is not 100% of the safeguard because you have courts, supreme courts or others or presidential overrules or whatever it is, which can undermine the ideals that you would like your country to be in. But as you can see in Israel and America today, we cannot agree and for as long as we cannot agree, we have to have some sort of structure that says this is the boundary you must not override. Whether it is on a national level or whether it is on a personal level, these are two parallel channels. Both of them for things to work, have to be in sync.

So thank you everybody. And please God, we will start Numbers next week.