Cleansing my Leviticus leprosy
Outline available now on my website! This is a big landmark for me!
My Leviticus outline is out!
As a much younger man, years ago, fresh off of creating chiastic fractal outlines of Genesis and Exodus, I set my mind to Leviticus. Because I had already seen in the Gospel of Matthew a triadic structure at center, I was prepared for the central book of the Pentateuch to be, I hypothesized, either chiastic or triadic. Very quickly in the Third Book of Moses, triadic structures are suggested, and so I looked for the book to take that shape overall.
The rest of the book confirmed that impression, but my outline wasn’t quite coming together with the clarity that I was used to with other books. I was failing to account for all the text in a coherent manner. Parts seemed out of place. There were interior structures I couldn’t make sense of — the Psalms hadn’t yet taught me the octave structure.
I saved my drafts and moved on. At one point, still long ago in a year I can’t number, I picked up Mary Douglas’s books on Leviticus and Numbers. I read them and profited by them, but didn’t turn to consider my own understanding of Leviticus. Douglas’s arrangement of the book to match the layout of the tabernacle is indeed very handsome.
Applying myself to Leviticus again in the present day, better equipped to understand the interior structures, I came to a very similar conclusion as Douglas. You can read a little about the most significant difference in the introduction I wrote on the site. Despite the difference, the Douglas model has very attractive features that are inspiring on their own. The fractal patterns I’m sensitive to don’t support it entirely, but as I said last week, that is not at all to say I think she is wrong.
There’s another model worth mentioning in this context, that of the BibleProject. You can watch their eight-minute video here. I’ll post an image of their outline below:
This is a chiastic model, centered on the Day of Atonement. I’ll admit that’s an attractive center, although in “Cosmic Chiasmus” terms Yom Kippur seems more about the Last Judgment at the end of history than the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection at history’s center. When you hear the video state its case for this model, it makes sense and seems plenty coherent. But when I look more closely at the text, the “RITUAL sacrifices” of ch. 1–7 and “RITUAL feasts” of ch. 23–25 — as well as the “ritual PURITY” of ch. 11–15 and “moral PURITY” of ch. 18–20 — appear poorly summarized as such, without a very deep understanding of what these sections are about. The parallels are weak, and I wouldn’t recommend this map to readers of Leviticus except as something to play off of with one’s thoughts.
On redeeming lands and houses
Apart from announcing my new outline of Leviticus and discussing these other models, I wanted to write something on the topic a little more substantial. Here’s a contemplation for you of Leviticus 25:23–34. It comes directly after the decree of the 50-year Jubilee and references it in the periodic remission of properties to their original, God-ordained possessors. (See the pericope’s context in the whole outline here.)
Readers of my “Cosmic Chiasmus” article will recognize the Greek symbols and patterns of indentation. Contemplating this passage through that lens, I find its soteriological and ecclesiological implications to be profound. I’ll go through it in order.
In the first two verses (α.), God reminds us the land is His, the Creator’s. He creates it, and thus He gives it to whom he gives it. That’s the purpose of the 50-year Jubilee cycle. The Israelites cannot permanently sell what they occupy as stewards and not as owners; they can only rent it out against the year of Jubilee.
The next verse (β.) addresses an Israelite with a brother in trouble: “If thy brother who is with thee be poor....” If a brother has to sell from his holdings in order to get by, that is, a nearby kinsman should come and bail him out. Family identity and family honor are to be upheld over individual causes. That’s family identity within the tribes of Israel, but it scales up as the core of Israelite identity itself, originally a family of brothers, set apart from a hostile world as God’s chosen people. (Hence the beta-position within this structure.)
However, as the Psalmist says, “A brother cannot redeem; shall a man redeem?” (Ps. 48:7). David speaks there of redeeming not one’s land but one’s soul. A brother can redeem land holdings according to the historical meaning of the Law, but anagogically speaking, “A brother cannot redeem.” So then what happens, on the historical level, when someone has no near kinsman to come bail him out?
That’s the subject of the passage’s central section (χ.), which says if he works hard and makes money, he can bail himself out before the Jubilee release. If he can’t make the money, it’ll still be all right eventually, as he’ll have his land remitted to him (or his heirs) in the Jubilee. I think of the first group in terms of the prophets, who made good with what they had and participated in Christ’s redemption before the time.
For this law depicts Israelites earning their own redemption, which anagogically should not be possible. The Psalmist from above elaborates, “A brother cannot redeem; shall a man redeem? He shall not give to God a ransom for himself, nor the price of the redemption of his own soul” (Ps. 48:7–8). That “a brother cannot redeem” is stated declaratively; but meaningfully, “shall a man redeem?” is posed as a question. That only God can redeem should be the main takeaway from the verse, and yet, as it turns out, a man shall redeem — the Godman shall redeem. Before then, however, men like the prophets who followed the Law spiritually were able to participate typologically in the redeeming action of the Godman, and that is what I think these verses betoken (meriting the chi-position) when they describe men paying their own ransom through hard work.
Not all are so fortunate, of course, and the Jubilee release is there to catch this second group, even as God is able to forgive debts through the redemption of Christ. But even before Christ, this passage from the Law signals the path of prophethood as open and possible. It’s not that they earn their own redemption through work, but that they prefigure the Christ who can. Even those who fail to redeem themselves prefigure Christ’s saving work when in humility they accept God’s mercy.
But this brings us typologically to the era of the Church, and the verses concerning houses in cities (ο.). Being a member of the Church is like inhabiting a home in a walled city — which is to say it typologically is like having a mortgage in the New Jerusalem. The city walls here represent the dogmas of the faith and the seal of chrism. If while being a member in the Church, one fails in virtue and sells that mortgage to another, there is a grace period to raise the ransom and reacquire the mortgage (that is, through repentance and confession to return to virtue). But it’s only a year. There’s some leeway, but considerably less than is given to those living outside the city (i.e., outside the Church). A much greater responsibility is placed on those in the Church, especially since there’s no second chances for them. If you lose your mortgage in the New Jerusalem, after a year’s time you are evicted, replaced by another, and your possession is not remitted to you in the Jubilee. You’ll have lost it. Mercifully, the “year’s” worth of leeway during which one can reacquire one’s holdings through repentance seems to symbolize the span of one’s life before death. But after that there is no forgiveness available for those who had already been given all that there is to give.
And for those living in villages without walls — which are like religious bodies outside the Church, be they villages that never had walls, or towns the walls of which were knocked down in the age of a previous generation — there is much greater mercy shown. The Lord knows to what attacks such villagers are subject, and how unprotected they are in the face of them. That they qualify for the Jubilee remission symbolizes the wealth of forgiveness available to them beyond the end of this world. The standards by which they will be judged will not be as strict. In the meantime though (it should be said), village houses in hock are redeemable, so the repentance required of the sinful city dwellers should be pursued by the sinful villagers as well.
At last we come to the final verses (ω.), where the Levitical priesthood is revealed as exempt from the previous limitations on redemption of city property. Even in a walled city their pawned houses can always be redeemed, and at any rate they shall be released in the Jubilee, because they belong to them forever. And the lands attached to these cities cannot be sold. In the beginning it was established that land belongs to God and not man, but here we see that God has intended to invest man with that same energy of perpetual possession. In holy priesthood (typologically open to all in Christ), a human being ceases to be a stranger and sojourner on the land, instead joining God in the activity of ownership. With this beautiful image, the Christian story is complete.
A simple plan for understanding Leviticus
So much for the fruits of my contemplating that passage. What about the rest of the book? What do all the animal sacrifices mean? What are we to make of all those leprosy laws? Why were Aaron’s sons killed? How did he win back Moses’s favor afterwards?
Leviticus is hard!
But at the head of my old notes on the topic, I rediscovered a simple plan for solving all of these difficulties — albeit one I never followed, but it sure still sounds like it would work... Just be like St. Anthony the Great!
From The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Benedicta Ward (Cistercian Publications, 1975), p. 7:
The brethren came to Abba Anthony and laid before him a passage from Leviticus. The old man went out into the desert, secretly followed by Abba Ammonas, who knew that this was his custom. Abba Anthony went a long way off and stood in there praying, crying in a loud voice, ‘God, send Moses, to make me understand this saying.’ Then there came a voice speaking with him. Abba Ammonas said that although he heard the voice speaking with him, he could not understand what it said.
While we commoners scrounge for scraps of wisdom, the elite have all the access. It’s like we never left Sinai. Glory be to God for all things.