Leviticus: lawyer’s paradise
From time to time I hear of people making new year resolutions to read through the whole of the Bible in a year. Very often, Leviticus is where such schemes get bogged down, and what seemed a good idea on 31 st December seems like a very poor idea by the middle to end of January. It may not be surprising therefore that there is only one reading from Leviticus in the three-year Sunday lectionary cycle. This probably matches most Christian views of the book as mainly concerned with Jewish ritual, accompanied by the conclusion that it is therefore mainly irrelevant. The one reading that is used is an excerpt from Leviticus 19. Today’s post therefore seems a good point to stop for a moment and think about this genre or category of law, and see if we can deepen our appreciation of this little read book. There has been a long Christian tradition of saying that after Jesus, the ritual law has been set aside for Christians, but the moral law is still valid. A good ...