Lev. 5-10 - all dressed up and nowhere to go but the slaughterhouse

The readings - Days 33-34 - Leviticus 5-7, 8-10

Leviticus is hard enough to read, but five months (and counting) of moderate-to-severe sleep deprivation makes it impossible some nights. Last night was one of those, so here we are with two days in one post again.

Chapter five starts us off with a discussion about guilt offerings, in fairly significant detail. There's a lot of clean/unclean talk, as tends to be expected and presented as typical in the Old Testament discussions of law and order.

What's less typical, and I don't quite know why, is the fact that despite attempts by people who don't know any better (as well as by some people who ought to ) to portray the Old Testament as ruthlessly legalistic in every way, and to counterpoint the "everyone dies no matter what" picture with the "merciful-God-of-the-New-Testament" idea, this whole chunk of text begins with the depiction of a sliding scale of justice that flies in the face of the typically presented Old Testament view.



Sins make people unclean. Uncleanness needs to be rectified, so sacrifices are necessary. Those sacrifices are firmly delineated, and generally involve expensive animals, but that's what's called for.

That's usually the end of the story as presented, but Lev. 5 goes on to answer the question nobody's actually asked yet: what happens if you're poor and don't have a flock to sacrifice the best from?

Well, if you don't have a bull, you get a goat. If you don't have a goat, you get birds. If you haven't got those, grab some grain and that'll do.

That's some (surprisingly?) progressive justice for a text that's supposed to be remorselessly judgmental...

---

Once again with this passage we get all the gruesome details of the actual sacrifices required by God, and they are gruesome.

Now, farm people (and, doubtless, the people to whom these laws were first given) likely suffer from much less squeamishness around blood and guts, etc, than city folk and the generally sheltered modern populace, but something strange hit me when looking at the procedure of slaughtering animals, etc.

Remember back at the end of Exodus when we got the detailed description of the incredibly expensive, beautiful and ornate robes that Aaron and his sons were to wear as priests of Israel? With all the purple and blue died skins and linens, the intricately crafted bells and whistles that got attached to them? The jeweled sashes and turbans?

I've never slaughtered a bull before, but I can't imagine it's a particularly tidy procedure, even if you don't have actually distribute the blood to various parts of the room where it's happening, but that's exactly what Aaron et al are supposed to do once they've gotten themselves all dolled up in their fancy priest robes.

In fact, part of the consecration and ordination ceremony is that blood and annointing oil is sprinkled on them and their clothes, and then they have to basically let it soak in for a solid week before they're allowed to leave the tent.

I'm not completely sure what to make of this juxtaposition, but it seems pretty clear that those people called by God to do His work are meant to get their hands dirty from the get-go. I think there's been a tendency to latch on to the "Sunday best" notion prototypified by the tabernacle specifications and overlook the "slaughter animals in your finest duds and then rub the blood all over yourself to help your congregation" aspect of it over the years.