Prophecy

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The purpose of the Sinaitic setting for the symbolic order is ultimately not historical but prophetic. Composed after Israel's subjugation to Babylon, Leviticus presents a body of ritual which had never been fully observed and whose physical and spiritual focus, the Temple, had now been razed to the ground. Looking toward the future, the book concludes with prophecy. Chapter 26, originally the conclusion to the Holiness Code, now serves as the conclusion to the book as a whole, apart from the appendix of miscellaneous material in chapter 27. In describing the good that will follow from keeping the Law and the evils that will result from failure to keep it, the chapter looks to the contemporary history of the Babylonian Exile:

And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths... As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it. (26:32-35)

The devastation of the land of Israel is seen, with rich prophetic irony, as the earth's long-delayed chance to observe the fallow periods demanded by the Law but hitherto neglected by the greedy tillers of the land.

The chapter is laden with imagery of journeying, and it promises that if the people walk in the Law, God will walk with them (as he had walked with Adam in the Garden): "If ye walk in my statutes, and keep [literally, 'hear'] my commandments... I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people" (26:3, 12). In contrast to this orderly walking and hearing will be the disordered flight and aural perception of the sinful in their new exile:

And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth. (v. 36)

Even in the new exile, though, God will be prepared to remember his Covenant if the people repent, as the conclusion of the chapter stresses (vv. 40-45). With faith and active repentance, the people can find a new Sinai even in Babylon.

Wilderness and Promised Land merge in Leviticus. The laws are inserted into the story of Sinai not only to give them authority but still more because the Wilderness exemplifies the fullest potential of a life of exile: that the place where everything has been lost can prove to be the place where everything is gained. The stark landscape of the Wilderness seems to the people to lack any source of hope, we might say any narrative possibility, to be a dead end: "and they said to Moses, Was it because Egypt lacked graves that you have brought us out to die in the wilderness?" (Exod. 14:11 [at]). Leviticus sees the Wilderness as the necessary lacuna, between cultures and between past and future history, in which the people can receive the redemptive symbolic order of the Law:

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the Lord your God. After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances. Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk therein: I am the Lord your God. (18:1-4)

In its presentation of the Law within this vision of the redemptive potentia of exile, Leviticus is the very heart of pentateuchal narrative.

NOTES

1. Gerhard von Rad, "The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, trans. E. Dicken (New York, 1966), pp. 1-78.

2. Harold Bloom, "'Before Moses Was, I Am': The Original and the Belated Testaments," in Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, I (Durham, N.C., 1984), 3—14.

3. See Roland Gradwohl, "Das 'fremde Feuer' von Nadab und Abihu," Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 75 (1963), 288-296.

4. See the pioneering studies by Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston, 1969); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1969); and Julia Kristeva, Powers of Honor, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York, 1982). Rene Girard explores the literary/social function of the sacrificial system in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977), with later amplifications in Des chases cachees depuis la fondation du monde (Paris, 1978) and The Scapegoat (Baltimore, 1986). Historians of religion and biblical scholars are also showing renewed interest; see, for example, Jacob Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism (Leiden, 1973).

5. Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 2-3.

6. See Peter Ackroyd, Exile and Restoration: A Study of Hebrew Thought of the Sixth Century B.C. (Philadelphia, 1968).

7. See Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Baton Rouge, 1976), especially chap, i, "In Praise of Alienation."