In the Wilderness

Although Israel doesn't go "in the wilderness" until Deuteronomy, the narrative itself goes in the wilderness much earlier, with a 27-chapter litany of rules.

Old Testament
Book THREE!: Leviticus
Laws concerning offerings and sacrifices
Chapter 1: Whole animal offerings (pigeon if you're poor!)
Chapter 2: Don't give me no bread, no bread
Chapter 3: "Shared offerings"
Chapter 4: Paying for sin

The origins and reasons for this book are actually quite interesting. According to the opening notes this book is more of the rules started in Exodus and finished in Numbers. All these rules are part of a "priestly account"--meaning the Aaronite and Levite priests. It also dates to the postexilic age.

As I read, my understanding of the bible becomes more complete (weird how that works!). Although I'm expecting Leviticus to be boring, the reasons for it are fascinating. These poor Israelites apparently just have never been able to hang on to a state. (So is modern Israel the fulfillment of God's promise? Why would it be, after 5000 years of broken promises? Probably the Israelites will manage to lose it yet again.) In the "postexilic" age (which remember means after the exile from Babylon, not the exodus from Egypt), "an impoverished, harassed Israel lived under the domination of the Persian Empire" (from my book's opening remarks).

According to the notes, Israel had a tendency to assimilate to the culture of her neighbors. That one sentence explains so much of Exodus and Leviticus. The problem was, when Israel lost an identifiable "land," and were dispersed among some other people, they tended just to fit in rather than maintain their own identity. So the Aaronite priests strove to give the Israelites an identity, something other than the land they lived in, something to distinguish them from the other people in the neighborhood.

These incredibly anal rules that we've been reading about already, and are about to get an earful in Leviticus, were designed for just that. (It's not just these rules, however; in a broader sense the entire old testament is the written record of the myths and legends of one particular culture.) The notes throughout Exodus repeatedly mentioned that some rule or another is specifically directed toward some practice of the Canaanites or some other tribe. The point was we don't do it that way, we do it this way. The rules against miscegenation had the same purpose. And many of the anachronisms relate to this as well--some of the rules, supposedly given to Moses on Mount Sinai, actually addressed cultural practices of neighbors Israel didn't even have yet!

All that was the effort of the Aaronite priests to hold together the clan as they dispersed among other groups of people. From that stand point, everything makes sense. Half of Exodus was so boring, with such attention to detail. But it was exactly those details that the Aaronites wanted the Jews to focus on. Those details were what the Aaronites wanted the Israelites to embrace as their culture. It's such a common impulse, it's something we see here in this country all the time as various immigrant populations try to keep their children from assimilating too completely into American culture A much better question, for me personally, is why? That is something I will never understand. If I were, say, to move to France, I would go there because I wanted to. If my children became "French," I wouldn't care! More power to them, we could have yearly "no-fly" celebrations. Why would someone need their children to carry on their traditions? Your "self" is going to be carried on by your children in every single interaction you have with them; you don't need to worry about forcing one particular thing on them. Those tantrums they throw? That's a reflection of you. The drugs? The teenage pregnancy? The depression? The anger? All that is your legacy! Congratulations! You've already ensured that your true self will live on in your children for generations. Don't worry about making them remember the "homeland."

A long time ago I visited a class at the University of Utah. The class was something like comparative religion. The day I went an orthodox rabbi gave a talk about Judaism. (Oh my god I'm so dumb! It just dawned on me this second what "Judaism" means. It means frikkin' JUDAH-ism! We've been talking about these hints of Judah cropping up here and there for a long time! I can't believe when I read that note about Gen. ch. 38 about the Judah story being inserted because later on David comes from the tribe of Judah, that it never crossed my mind that JUDAH is Judaism. I can be so retarded sometimes!)

Anyway, this orthodox rabbi gave a talk (and again, I apologize for not knowing the proper terms--I don't know if he was orthodox or Hasidic or what he was, but he had the yarmulke and the tassels and the ringlets of hair). Something I've always remembered is he said that Judaism is the religion for an anal-retentive person, that his religion is all about the minutiae of the rituals.

And now we understand why! It's not an accident of the religion, it is the religion.

This leads me to another important question to contemplate as we read through the bible. Why this book? Why this book? Why did the Canaanite belief system not survive? Why not Babylonian or Pharaonic? It might be the case that the Aaronite priests were very successful in their endeavor. The belief system they set up worked, it created a cultural identity that has survived thousands of years. And at the same time, I think it explains a lot of the animosity toward Jews--they are simply more successful as a people than others. They learned specifically how to survive as a people even when "strangers in a strange land." That's exactly the kind of thing that breeds suspicion and jealousy among the small-minded (read human).

Who knows, Judaism might be one of the most successful intellectual enterprises of all time.


--bibletoenail