Week 5 Leviticus 1-16
If someone asked me what book of the bible I thought was the hardest one to sit down and read through I’d say Leviticus.
One reason Leviticus is such mind-numbing and terrible read is that it kind of buries me with details that are of no interest & no value & no relevance to me.
So this year my approach to reading Leviticus was to a) accept that i have to read the uninteresting & valueless & irrelevant content but b) process it by mentally dismissing those parts (not exactly ignoring them…but not letting them dominate my thinking). The point was to see if I could locate anything hidden-in-the-weeds – useful generalities among the non-useful specifics (so for instance I disregarded details about animals (blood skin kidneys fat liver entrails). I’d look for usable content behind those details.
Here’s some examples of basic ideas I found. Sacrifice. Offerings. Guilt. Atonement. Forgiveness. Unfaithfulness. Holy. Consecrated. Clean. Purification. I found a few others but this looked like a pretty good starter list.
One intriguing example is a triad of linked values in chapter 5: if anyone sins…he shall bear his iniquity. He shall bring to the priest…an offering, and the priest shall make atonement for him…and he shall be forgiven. It is a guilt offering; he has indeed incurred guilt before the Lord.
Sin > iniquity > guilt > offering > atonement > forgiveness.
Seems like slim-pickings for 16 whole chapters. Still…the ideas are about as fundamental as I’m going to find.
Note: quote from Leviticus 5:17-19 (ESV)