Leviticus

What This Book Is

The instruction manual for life around the tabernacle: sacrifices, priests, purity, and festivals, all built around one idea, that God is holy and wants to be approached.

Overview

Leviticus is where a lot of read-the-Bible-in-a-year plans quietly end. It is dense, technical, and concerned with matters most modern readers have no category for. It is also more coherent than it first appears.

The book picks up exactly where Exodus stopped. The tabernacle is finished and the glory of God has filled it, which raises an immediate and serious problem: how does a people who are not holy live in close quarters with a God who is. Leviticus is the answer to that question.

The first seven chapters describe the offerings, each with a different purpose. Then the priesthood is installed, and almost immediately two priests are killed for approaching wrongly, which the book records without softening. Chapters 11 to 15 deal with what is clean and unclean, categories about ritual fitness to approach God rather than about hygiene or morality. Chapter 16 stands at the centre: the Day of Atonement, when the whole nation's guilt is dealt with at once and a goat carries it away into the wilderness.

The second half turns outward. Holiness is not confined to the sanctuary. It shows up in honest scales, in leaving the edges of your field for the poor, in how you treat foreigners, the deaf, the blind, and the elderly. Love your neighbour as yourself is a line from this book.

The repeated refrain is the key: be holy, for I am holy.

Structure

• Chapters 1 to 7: The offeringsFive kinds of sacrifice, each for a different purpose.
• Chapters 8 to 10: The priesthoodAaron and his sons ordained, and a sobering failure.
• Chapters 11 to 15: Clean and uncleanWhat makes a person fit to approach the sanctuary.
• Chapter 16: The Day of AtonementThe whole nation's guilt dealt with, and a goat sent away.
• Chapters 17 to 27: Holy livingHoliness worked out in sex, business, farming, festivals, and justice.

Themes

Why It Matters

Leviticus takes seriously something we tend to skip over, that God's holiness is real and that approaching him is not a casual thing. It also insists that holiness is not merely ceremonial. The same chapters that regulate sacrifices command generosity to the poor and honesty in business. Hebrews reads this book closely to explain what Jesus accomplished, and the sacrificial language the New Testament uses for the cross comes almost entirely from here.

How to Read It

• Read chapter 16, the Day of Atonement, first. It is the hinge the whole book turns on.
• Read chapter 19 to see that holiness includes wages, honesty, and the treatment of foreigners.
• Keep Hebrews nearby. It is the New Testament's own commentary on this material.
• Skim the offering details rather than abandoning the book. Watch what each one is for.

Key Verse

Did You Know?

• Love your neighbour as yourself, which Jesus called the second greatest commandment, comes from Leviticus 19:18.
• The scapegoat, an animal that carries guilt away into the wilderness, is described in Leviticus 16.
• The book is largely made up of direct speech: God speaking to Moses, over and over.

Where to Start Reading