Leviticus and the Nature of Sacrifices

The purpose of this research is to provide a survey of the nature and significance of the various sacrifices presented in the early chapters of Leviticus. The plan of the research will be to set forth the cultural and narrative context in which Leviticus appears and then to discuss the pattern of ideas in the part of the text that deals with sacrifice as well as the latent meanings and implications that derive from its preoccupation with sacrifice.

If it can be said that the book of Exodus presents the narrative of the Hebrews' escape from Egypt and the Lord's gift of the Decalogue, the tabernacle, and the Ark of the Covenant (Exod. 20, 31, and 37), then it is instructive to remember that Exodus also presents the spectacle of Aaron's constructing the golden calf and the mass rush to worship the idol instead of God (Exod. 32-33). The pattern that the children of Israel had of acknowledging His supreme, cosmic greatness but then drifting into polytheistic idol worship is a recurrent theme throughout the pre-Christian books of the bible, and it drives the narrative thread of the conclusion of the book of Exodus. Although God forgives the people after Moses pleads for mercy for them, what is withheld is just as significant as what has earlier been promised: quick passage to the Promised Land. In Exodus 40, the people find themselves bound to the behavior of the cloud over the tabernacle, sometimes journeying and sometimes journeying not (Exod. 40.36-37).

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, to separate, divide, and exclude--to create and disseminate a notion of the other as unholy and physically unclean even while claiming to embrace and sanctify all. It is a discourse that has long since been complicated by the racial discourse of nineteenth-century science. The exploitation of Leviticus by partialist thinkers seeking a rationale for unequal representations of various human groups, hence for colonizing of inferior peoples, belongs to a different moral exercise from working out moral standards at the foot of Mt. Sinai. On the other hand, the intrinsically insular nature of the sacrificial injunctions of Leviticus have been interpreted more or less "against" the Jews. In that regard, Harrison cites Kant's conclusion that "Judaism fails to achieve the status of a religion in the full sense, since 'its practice is external, a 'cult' of rituals and observances which are not rationally motivated, but 'heteronomous'--the result of external commands.'" Harrison also observes that anti-Semitic tendencies have flowed to some degree from Kant's analysis of Judaism, and although he does not lay the Holocaust of the 20th century at the foot of the Enlightenment, he notes the importance of distinguishing between later interp

Category: Philosophy - L