The Symbolic Order

The fivefold interweaving of narrative orders (ritual, patriarchal, Sinaitic, monarchical, and contemporary) in chapter ю forms a fitting conclusion to the first third of the book. Taken overall, chapters i-io serve as a narrative introduction to the symbolic order of cultic regulations which make up the second two-thirds of the book: the laws of purity and atonement in chapters 11-16 and the group of ordinances known as the

Holiness Code (chaps. 17—26, with an appendix in chap. 27). After long neglect, these latter sections have begun to receive attention on several fronts.⁴ As the structural anthropologist Mary Douglas has observed, "rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience. So far from being aberrations from the central project of religion, they are positive contributions to atonement. By their means, symbolic patterns are worked out and publicly displayed."⁵

A symbolic structure can be deduced, although it is not explicit in the text; but do the assorted ordinances in these chapters have any con­nection with what has gone before? Readers who have come to appreciate the literary value of the previous chapters are likely to view the laws of Leviticus 11-25 with dismay, for the regulations and ethical statements given here largely lack the narrative form of the earlier chapters. In fact this section presents not a nonnarrative but an d«£marrative, whose purpose is to complete the transformation of history inaugurated in chapters 1-7.

In the context of the Primeval History as portrayed in the Pentateuch, we can say in rhetorical terms that the Eden story describes a scene of metaphorically based union with God, in whose image and likeness man is created, whereas the fall away from God and into history takes the form of a series of metonymic displacements illustrated in the major stages of prehistory (Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel). This world of metonymies, of cause-and-effect relations, parts standing in for inaccessible wholeness, is the world of most biblical prose writing. By contrast, Leviticus seeks to undo the metonymic cause-and-effect re­lations of narrative; it struggles to recreate a metaphoric union with God in very different terms. Traditional narrative strategies are not so much abandoned as transformed, which is why Leviticus can be described as a book which uses literary methods for nonliterary ends. The narrative patterns examined above are still here—regulations are often described scenically, for example—but most of them are fractured and recombined in strange ways. The narrative order is subordinated to a conceptual order, and the surviving fragments no longer show a progressive narrative de­velopment. Instead, there are disconcerting moments such as the descrip­tion in 16:3-4:

Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering. He shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh, and shall be girded with a linen girdle, and with the linen mitre shall he be attired: these are holy garments; therefore shall he wash his flesh in water, and so put them on.

The narrative goes backward here, describing first the entry into the inner part of the Temple, then how Aaron is to have dressed, and finally his bath before he dresses. In an extended series of variations on this rhetorical movement, the sacrificial order creates a series of disjunctions and dis- placements, by which the Holiness Code seeks to reconstruct a metaphoric wholeness from the pieces of the narrative metonymies it has taken apart.

In much of the Hebrew Bible, the rhetoric of displacement is pre­sented through the theme of exile.⁶ Leviticus is no exception, and exile can fairly be said to be the very basis for the construction of the antinar-rative ritual order. To be holy, qadosh, is to be set apart; the root means "separation, withdrawal, dedication." If a metaphoric union with God is no longer possible in a fallen world, the Law can on the other hand create a life built around a principle of separation which will serve as a metaphor for the transcendental otherness of God. God himself repeatedly makes the point that the people's separateness is to mirror his own: "Ye shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy" (19:2).

The separation from what is not holy paradoxically creates a close spiritual connection not only between God and man but also between man and the material world. The purity laws concerning physical disfig­urements apply not only to the people but also to their clothes and even their houses, which are subject to the same purity regulations, with mil­dew and mold analogized to leprosy (chaps. 13-14). The people are to be separated not only from their neighbors but even, in a sense, from them­selves: "Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they [would] defile my tabernacle that is among them" (15:31).

The text quite directly makes the connection between holiness and exile as it goes about creating a metaphoric wholeness of God, people, and land through the mechanisms of purity and avoidance. Thus the people's ritual link to the land of Israel expresses not a sense of possession but a permanence of exile. The land itself must keep the Sabbath and cannot be sold in perpetuity, for it belongs not to the people but to God: "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me" (25:23). The termer, "stranger," might best be translated into modern English as "resident alien" and is the term used for the Israelites during their stay in Egypt. In taking up the term, the text transforms the lament of Moses, who named his eldest son in response to a life of exile: "he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger [ger] in a strange land" (Exod. 2:22). Leviticus ex­presses a desire for something closer than possession, a fellowship of exile, shared among the people, their servants, their cattle, their goods, and the land itself.

The transformation of exile makes alienation the basis for a renewed ethical closeness to one's neighbors and even to strangers: "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord... the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God" (19:18, 34).⁷

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