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.