ONE OF THE MAJOR WEAKNESSES of modern culture is our loss of morality. We misunderstand the nature of laws and rules and commandments, calling them legalisms; and then, based on this misunderstanding, we reject them. We think legalism and morality are the same thing. We don’t like either one and begin to squirm when the subject of morality comes up.
Actually, many of us begin to squirm as well when the subject of the biblical books of Leviticus and Numbers comes up—and for much the same reasons: our discomfort with morality. We don’t like reading what appear to be the outdated dictates of a grouchy God who seems to have gotten up on the wrong side of bed. What is the point?
This is what makes Roy Gane’s commentary so helpful. He tells us the point. One of his primary emphases is that Levitical laws are not legalistic and outdated. By carefully and thoroughly taking us through each chapter and verse, we discover that we can learn from other people’s morality, even when their culture is radically different from ours.
The point is this: If you read Leviticus and Numbers faithfully, your squeamishness about morality itself will begin to disappear. In order to explain this lesson, let me elaborate on two ideas that emerge from reading this authoritative material. (1) The laws of Leviticus depend for their efficacy on the fact that they are created by and implemented in a community of people. They describe the “dynamic worship system of ancient Israel,” a system that has theological meaning. These are not laws for individuals.
These are laws that are only secondarily about safety and health and order and good manners. Make no mistake, they are about safety and health and order and good manners—but only after they are about the worship of God, which is the precondition, the setting, of all the Levitical laws. Why are we to love our neighbor (17:9)? Because we cannot worship God unless we love our neighbor as ourselves. Once this is established, we discover that loving our neighbor creates good, safe, healthy, intercommunal relationships.
We live in a culture where we tend to understand laws and rules and commandments primarily as they relate to us as individuals. Because we live in an individualistic age, it takes deliberate effort to realize that individual morality is rooted in communal morality. In the Bible, this is not made as explicit as it could because in biblical times it was assumed that the values of the community precede those of the individual. Today the order is reversed, and understanding the Levitical laws demands that we include in our hermeneutic an acknowledgment of the Bible’s priorities.
(2) The laws of Leviticus only make sense to us if we are able to transpose their meaning from a cultural context three millennia in time and half a world in distance from our own. The content of the laws of Leviticus can seem strange. The questions on mildew in chapter 13, for example, can only be understood by those who live in a tropical country where this is still a problem. The solution to “destructive mildew”—to have the priest adjudicate whether or not the article in question is to be destroyed—is not something most modern church leaders would like to have added to their job description. Nevertheless, the community implications of this law are manifest. Any destructive force that has the potential to spread throughout the body of Christ is something we should all be concerned with corralling.
Even the most arcane of the laws found in Leviticus have at their root a principle that we should be able to make application to our lives. As we have said, the general hermeneutical principle is to attempt to see the communal meaning of what we are tempted to interpret as individual laws. As Roy Gane helps us to see in this commentary, there is great, practical wisdom in these two books.
Is it any wonder, given these two ideas, that the New Testament so often refers to the laws of Leviticus to explain the morality of the people of the kingdom of God? They are laws sent to us by God through Moses. That means they are important. They are laws that ordered the lives of a “holy, tribal community centered in the divine presence.” Since that is what we long to happen in the church (and churches) of today, we could do worse than try to live the lifestyle created by these laws.
God’s call to holiness is not a call to be embraced by hermits. It is a call that is always lived out in relation to a community, a group of people centered in the worship of God—a group of people situated in a wider world of decentered, sometimes immoral, sometimes amoral cultural groups. It turns out that in many ways we are not so different from this tribe wandering in the deserts of Sinai after all.
Terry C. Muck