You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
See Important Quotations Explained
Summary
Throughout Leviticus, Israel remains encamped
at Mount Sinai while God appears in the Tent of Meeting, dictating
to Moses his specifications regarding the Jewish ceremonial laws.
The laws are extremely detailed, outlining every aspect of how and
when religious offerings are to be presented to God. God gives the
instructions himself, and his voice comprises the majority of the
text. A brief narrative interlude describes the anointing of Aaron
and his sons as Israel’s priests. At the ceremony, God appears and
engulfs the altar in a burst of flames, eliciting shouts of joy
from the people. Soon after, God also sends fire to consume two
of Aaron’s sons when they neglect to make the right preparations
for approaching the altar.
God lists various types of forbidden sexual
behavior and discusses foods and physical conditions that can make
a person unclean. Uncleanliness can result from things such as bodily
discharge or touching a dead carcass. An unclean person must leave
the Israelite camp or undergo physical cleansing, waiting periods,
and religious sacrifices. Typically, sexual sins are punishable
by death, but God also instructs the Israelites to kill a man who
blasphemes, or curses God’s name. Of all his restrictions, God places
particular emphasis on the prohibition against eating meat with
blood still in it: doing so will result in banishment, not only
from Israel but from God’s graces as well.
In the end, God promises to give Israel great abundance
and success if it obeys these laws. If Israel is disobedient, though,
God will send destruction and famine and “abhor” the Israelites
(26:30). But the laws
in Leviticus also set aside an annual Day of Atonement during which
the priest is to offer sacrifices for the forgiveness of the entire
nation. As long as the Israelites confess and repent for their sins,
God promises to keep his covenant and never leave them.
At the beginning of Numbers, Israel prepares to continue
the journey from Mount Sinai to the promised land. God devotes one
of the twelve tribes, the Levites, to assist Aaron in the work of
the priesthood, maintaining and watching over Israel’s religious
articles. After dedicating the Tabernacle, which houses the Ark
of the Covenant, the Israelites leave Sinai, guided by the movements
of a cloud that rests over the Tabernacle. Entering the desert,
the people begin to complain about everything from the lack of interesting food
to Moses’s leadership.
Moses sends spies into Canaan to explore the promised
land. Upon returning, two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, report
that Israel can successfully conquer the Canaanite people with
God’s help. However, some of the spies incite an uprising, arguing
that it will be impossible to take the land from the Canaanites
and that Israel should return to Egypt instead. God plans to destroy
the people for their lack of faith, but Moses intervenes and convinces
God to forgive them. God relents but delivers a heavy curse. He announces
that the current generation of Israelites, with the exception of
Joshua and Caleb, will not be allowed to enter the promised land.
Moses leads the people back toward the Red Sea to wander in the
wilderness for a period of forty years.
Another revolt occurs when three men grow jealous of
Moses’s leadership. God plans to destroy the entire nation because
of the men’s jealousy, but Moses persuades God to destroy only the
guilty parties. Moses warns the people that the men will die as
a result of their own disobedience. God causes the ground to open
and swallow the men, but the Israelites blame Moses and Aaron for
the incident. Very angry, God sends a rapidly spreading plague through
the crowd, killing thousands. Aaron runs out into the crowd and
holds up the priest’s censer to atone for Israel’s wrongdoing, stopping
the plague in its destructive path.
Following this event, Moses and Aaron themselves disobey
God. The people continue to complain about the lack of water and express
their longing to be back in Egypt. God instructs Moses to speak
to a rock and command it to produce water. Moses, instead, hits
the rock angrily with his staff. The rock proceeds to pour forth water,
but God tells Moses and Aaron that they, too, will never enter the
promised land because of this brash act. Aaron dies soon after, and
the priesthood passes on to Aaron’s son Eleazar.
Israel wanders in the lands southwest of Canaan, requesting
safe passage from the surrounding nations but receiving little hospitality in
return. With God’s help, Israel conquers the Amorites and settles in
their lands. Learning of the overthrow, the king of Moab summons
a renowned sorcerer, Balaam, to come and pronounce a curse on the
Israelites. The angel of God intercepts Balaam on the road to Moab,
frightening Balaam’s donkey. When Balaam strikes the panicked animal,
the donkey miraculously speaks, rebuking Balaam. The Lord points
out the angel’s presence. The angel of God forbids Balaam to curse
the Israelites before the king of Moab. Balaam arrives in Moab and
delivers four cryptic oracles to the king, blessing Israel and predicting
Moab’s destruction.
The Israelite men succumb to the surrounding native peoples
by fraternizing with the local women and worshipping the pagan god Baal.
God sends a plague on Israel that ends only when Eleazar’s son,
the priest, kills an Israelite man and his Midianite mistress, stabbing
them before all of Israel with a single thrust of his spear. Eleazar’s
son’s impassioned act earns God’s approval, and God leads Israel
in destroying the Midianites, plundering their wealth in the process.
As the forty-year waiting period draws to a close, God appoints
Joshua to eventually succeed Moses as the people’s leader.
The Book of Deuteronomy begins in the final,
fortieth year of Israel’s wandering in the desert. Stationed east
of the Jordan River, Moses addresses the new generation of Israelites
in preparation for entering the promised land. He summarizes the
events of the past four decades and encourages the young Israelites
to remember God’s miracles and covenant with Israel. He forbids
the worship of other gods or idols in the new land and repeats the
Ten Commandments given by God at Mount Sinai. Most importantly,
Moses gives explicit instructions to the Israelites to destroy all
the native inhabitants of the promised land so that the Canaanites
do not interfere with Israel’s worship of God. Moses restates many
of the social laws and rules of conduct outlined in Leviticus, adding
a few new laws, such as the requirement for the Israelites to cancel
debts every seven years.
Moses stresses God’s love for Israel, describing God
as someone who protects orphans, widows, and oppressed people. Israel
is to love God intensely in return, with absolute devotion. The
words of God’s laws are very important. Moses instructs the Israelites
to meditate on these words and to write the laws on their bodies
and on the doorframes of their homes. Moses argues that the love
of God and a commitment to his laws will be considered goodness
for Israel (6:25).
While Moses predicts that Israel will eventually grow disobedient,
he notes that God will welcome Israel back with abundance and prosperity
whenever Israel returns to obedience.
At God’s direction, Moses composes a song that recounts
Israel’s history of unfaithfulness and extols God’s everlasting
compassion. Moses says the song will be a reminder to future Israelites
of their covenant with God. He writes the song in the Book of the
Laws and places the book with the Ark of the Covenant. Afterward,
Moses ascends a mountain where God shows him a vision of the promised land.
Moses dies and is buried by God. The author praises him as the only
prophet in Israel’s history who performed such impressive miracles
and who knew God “face to face” (34:10).
Analysis
The books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy
form the bulk of the Hebrew law, or Torah. Each text mixes procedural
instructions and legal matters with a variety of narrative voices
and action. The separate books are probably the collected writings
of priests with different interests and perspectives, written sometime
during Israel’s tumultuous exile in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. The
three works document an important stage in the development of Israel’s
identity as a people and a nation. The prose is frequently arduous
and repetitive, but it functions as a long, concentrated pause in
the narrative of the Old Testament. Israel’s wandering in the desert
can be seen as the nation’s adolescence—a period of education and
growth following the nation’s birth in the exodus from Egypt and
the events at Mount Sinai.
The fact that the Israelites’ punishment for
certain infractions is to isolate or expel the offending individual
from the camp demonstrates the extraordinary desire of the people
to remain part of the community. The Israelite camp is set up in
concentric circles with the tabernacle at its center: Moses and
Aaron are closest to the tabernacle, followed by the Levites who
care for it, and the rest of the tribes surround them. Since uncleanness
bars a person from approaching the sacred religious items, physical
impurity places one farthest from the center of Israel. In this
way, God’s injunctions challenge the Israelites to strive to remain near
the nation’s center. The distinction between purity and impurity helps
promote a distinction between an accepted, privileged “us” and an
outcast “them” who are outside the circle of the community.
Moses’s emphasis on the word “heart” in his sermons
is also critical to Israel’s understanding of itself as a unified
people. Moses describes the physical and external regulations of
the law by using spiritual and internal imagery. He says, “Hear,
O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the
Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with
all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today
in your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6).
The idea that Israel as a whole has a “heart” or a group of “hearts”
suggests that the nation has developed a set of personal or private
experiences over the forty years of wandering in the desert. This
waiting period distances Israel from Egypt and the laws at Mount
Sinai, forcing the nation to form a collective memory of these events.
When Moses instructs the people, “You shall put these
words of mine in your heart and soul,” he encourages them to internalize
and embrace these collective, national memories (Deuteronomy 11:18).
Moses portrays the religious laws no longer as a list of actions
to be performed in the future but as sacred words and ideas that
are a part of a past and an internal life that is unique to Israel.
The description of God as loving and
compassionate in Deuteronomy is perplexing in light of God’s intense
wrath in Numbers. Moses, however, seems to see God’s violent reaction
to Israel’s complaints and infidelities as an exercise or a test
of Israel’s commitment to the covenant. Indeed, God’s destruction
follows a consistent pattern in Numbers: the people complain and
wish to return to Egypt; God threatens to destroy the people; Moses
or another representative intercedes on behalf of the people; and
God relents, punishing only a portion of Israel’s population. The
climax in these exercises occurs when representatives of the people
speak on behalf of Israel. The moment of intercession when the plague
is stopped by Aaron running into the crowd or by Eleazar’s son stabbing
the man and his foreign mistress are both climactic. Man’s intercession
does not require God to stop his destruction, but it creates the
opportunity for Israel’s leaders to display religious zeal and for
God to show his mercy. God manifests his compassion and love not
by what he does, but by what he does not do. Israel emerges from
these encounters as a nation that has survived trials and hardship—a
resilient people, with its weakest members now weeded out.
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