The Ritual Order

The opening chapters of Leviticus provide one of the clearest illustrations of the narrative quality of law throughout the Pentateuch. In the earlier stages of the Priestly composition, before the Torah was divided into separate books, the material of Leviticus 1-7 was not included. The great account of the construction of the tabernacle, which now closes Exodus, would have been directly followed by the anointing of the tabernacle and the investiture of Aaron and his sons, the material which now constitutes chapters 8—10. A decisive literary decision was taken, then, to open the new book not with a direct continuation of the story from Exodus, but with seven chapters' worth of ritual prescriptions concerning sacrifices. Why was this done?

Historical criticism variously accounts for this material as an instruc­tion manual for priests at Jerusalem or, more politically, as the result of priestly disputes at the time of the text's reformulation. On this reading, the priests from Jerusalem inserted this material in order to establish Sinaitic authority for their particular ritual practices, as against other ritual forms practiced at Shiloh or elsewhere in the country. The writing down of these laws may well have had some such impetus, but the choice to insert them here, at the start of the book, serves a literary purpose as well. Indeed, the theological meaning of the insertion is most clearly understood through the passage's narrative function.

The whole section has been constructed with considerable care. Thus, the first three chapters show a consistent triadic form. Three kinds of sacrifice are described (burnt offerings, cereal offerings, and peace offer­ings). Each of these offerings is in turn divided into three variants, which describe different offerings that can be made to fulfill each type of sacrifice. This tripled threefold structure gives these chapters a certain lyrical aspect. Each subsection, a few verses in length, functions stanzaically, even ending with a refrain, some variation on the formulaic phrase "it is an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord."

The first chapter is the most consistent, giving its refrain identically each time, and furthermore giving the refrain a three-part form of its own: "it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord" (vv. 9, 13, 17). The repetition of "burnt sacrifice" and offering made by fire" is instructive. The first term is the technical term for this particular sacrifice, 'olah, whereas the second is the generic term for offerings involving fire, 'isheh. Clearly there is no real need to repeat both terms, as the first presupposes the second, but the phrasing strongly suggests the parallelism characteristic of Hebrew poetry. (In chapters 2 and 3, where the cereal offering and peace offering are also burnt, but where the poetic potential of two parallel terms for burning is lacking, the text simply uses the term 'isheh.)

Although the structure is lyric, the presentation is dramatic. Rather than simply prescribing the necessary details, the text stages the event, presenting a little ritual drama of interaction between the person offering the sacrifice, the priest, and God:

And if his offering be of the flocks, namely, of the sheep, or of the goats, for a burnt sacrifice; he shall bring it a male without blemish. And he shall kill it on the side of the altar northward before the Lord: and the priests, Aaron's sons, shall sprinkle his blood round about upon the altar. And he shall cut it into his pieces, with his head and his fat: and the priest shall lay them in order on the wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar: But he shall wash the inwards and the legs with water: and the priest shall bring it all, and burn it upon the altar: it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord. (1:10—13)

The identity of the priest(s) has been specified as "the sons of Aaron" in order to emphasize the narrative setting at Sinai, although occasional lapses into the singular indicate the use of the generalizing designation "the priest" before these rules were put into their present context. The style, though simple, is unhurried, with occasional flourishes such as "on the wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar" which emphasize the sense of ritual order and fill out the scene of ritual drama.

The presentation of the variants in each form of sacrifice reflects great skill. The burnt offering, for example, may consist of three types of animal: a bull, a lamb or goat, or a dove or pigeon. Lambs and goats are sacrificed in essentially the same way as bulls; birds require somewhat different treatment. The text could simply have mentioned the lambs and goats briefly as an alternative to bulls, but it gives them as much space as the birds, allotting to each variant a full scenic description, as in the example quoted above. These latter descriptions are slightly abbreviated from the first version, to avoid wearisome repetition, but they are full enough to impart an overall sense not so much of three choices as of a series of three sacrifices. Thus the text dramatizes the sense of orderly sequence at the heart of ritual. The singularity of the giving of the Law at Sinai is extended, through the rituals inaugurated at Sinai itself, to a narrative order of varied repetition.

The emphasis on the different forms of sacrifice allows for narrative variety within the ritual order. The rites reflect different points in the ritual year, and different problems which require the several different types of sacrifice. Equally important, the variant forms allow for differences in the circumstances of the people making the offerings. Lambs and goats are permitted for people who cannot afford a bull; birds are specified for people too poor to offer a lamb or a goat (as is explicitly stated later, in 12:8 and 14:21). The ritual order is not a millenarian order which would gloss over details of wealth and poverty; it remains linked to individual circumstance as well as to the cyclical order of the ritual calendar and the structural order of different kinds of sin.

At the same time, individual circumstance is delimited and ordered, in the implicit division of society into only three economic groups (wealthy, average, and poor). This is not an individualized narrative, or even an image of extended contingency with a multiplicity of categories (envisioning, for example, other groups of people so poor that even a bird is unaffordable, or so rich that even a bull would be too trivial a sacrifice). It remains a ritual order, but one which gives a definite place both to circumstantial variations and to narrative progression.

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