Lecture 9-3: The Holiness Code and What It Asks of a People

The verse Jesus pairs with Deuteronomy 6:5 in all three synoptic Gospels, and which Paul and James both call the summary of the law. It is here, in Leviticus, in a chapter about mixed fabrics and honest scales, and it is set up by a command to confront a neighbor rather than nurse a grievance against him. The love commanded is not first of all a feeling; it is the alternative to hatred kept private.

The address is to "all the congregation." Chapters 1-16 speak mostly to priests; this speaks to everyone.

Poverty relief legislated as a restriction on harvesting rather than as a transfer. The poor are not given anything; they are given access, and they do the work.

The same verb, the same construction as verse 18, extended sixteen verses later to the resident foreigner, with a reason drawn from Israel's own history. Any account of Leviticus 19 that stops at verse 18 has left out its most striking extension.

The sentence inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. Its context is land tenure and debt slavery, not political independence.

The premise of the whole chapter, and one of the more radical sentences in the Pentateuch. Israel does not own the land. It is a resident foreigner on property belonging to someone else — which is exactly the status chapter 19 commanded them to protect in others.

The blessing at the head of the list is not prosperity but residence. The book that began with a voice from inside a tent Moses could not enter ends its legal material with a promise that the tent stays.

What makes chapters 17-26 different

Set the two halves side by side and the differences are audible.

Address. Chapters 1-16 speak largely to priests about priestly operations, with the ordinary Israelite present chiefly as the person bringing an animal. Chapter 19 opens by addressing "all the congregation."

Refrain. "I am Yahweh" and "I am Yahweh your God" occur roughly fifty times in these ten chapters and rarely before. It attaches to commands about wages, honest weights, testimony, and the treatment of the disabled, and its function is to ground ordinary social behavior in the identity of God rather than in consequence or utility.

Holiness language. The demand "you shall be holy" is directed at the whole people, repeatedly (19:2; 20:7; 20:26). In chapters 1-16 holiness is chiefly a property of places, objects, and priests.

The land as an agent. Chapter 18 says the land vomited out its previous inhabitants because of their defilement (18:25) and warns Israel that it can happen again. Chapter 25 says the land belongs to God and must have its own sabbaths. Chapter 26 threatens exile so the land can enjoy the sabbaths it was denied. The land in H is not scenery; it responds.

Conclusion form. Chapter 26's blessings and curses correspond formally to the endings of ancient Near Eastern treaties and to Deuteronomy 28, and nothing in chapters 1-16 has this shape.

Is H a separate source?

This is a point where readers will not agree.

The classical position, from Klostermann through Wellhausen's synthesis, treated H as an older collection that the Priestly writers took up and incorporated, editing it lightly. On this account P is later than H, which fit the developmental picture of the classical Documentary Hypothesis: an earlier, more ethically oriented collection absorbed into a later, more ritually elaborated system.

Milgrom and Knohl reversed the order, and this is now the most discussed position in the technical literature. Israel Knohl, in The Sanctuary of Silence (Hebrew 1992, English 1995), argued that H is later than P, and that it represents a "Holiness School" which took over the Priestly Torah and extended it. His evidence includes H's use of P's technical vocabulary in expanded senses, H's willingness to speak of God in terms P avoids, H's extension of holiness from the sanctuary to the land and the people, and its engagement with ethical concerns of the sort the eighth-century prophets raised, which he read as a response to them. Milgrom adopted a version of this and went further, arguing that H is the final editor of the Pentateuch's priestly material, responsible for the framing of the whole and for verses scattered well outside chapters 17-26. On this reading H is not an embedded fossil but the outermost layer.

The unity case. Others hold that the differences are differences of subject matter and rhetorical register rather than of authorship. A body of instruction addressed to priests about the disposal of blood will not sound like a body of instruction addressed to farmers about gleanings, and a code that concludes with sanctions will differ in form from one that does not. Ancient Near Eastern law collections regularly change register between sections. On this account "H" names a real literary phenomenon and does not require a separate school. Scholars have also questioned Knohl's directional argument, noting that shared vocabulary used differently can be explained by either direction of dependence, and that dating a text by the ethical concerns it displays assumes a developmental scheme rather than demonstrating one.

What can be said. The distinctness of chapters 17-26 is a datum. That it results from a separate compositional layer is a strong inference held by most specialists. That the layer is later than P rather than earlier is a live argument in which Knohl and Milgrom currently have the better-developed case, but which has not closed. And, as the course has said in chapter 2, the composition question does not determine the interpretive question: chapter 19 says what it says whoever wrote it, and a reader who cannot decide between Klostermann and Knohl can still read the chapter.

Chapter 19, and the trouble it makes for a familiar scheme

Read Leviticus 19 straight through and list what it legislates, in order. Reverence for parents and Sabbath. No idols. How to eat a peace offering on the third day. Gleanings for the poor and the foreigner. No stealing, no lying, no false swearing. Wages paid to a hired worker before morning. Not cursing the deaf or tripping the blind. Justice in court, favoring neither poor nor great. Not slandering, not standing by while a neighbor's life is at risk. Not hating a brother in the heart; rebuke rather than grudge; love your neighbor as yourself. No crossbreeding cattle, no mixed seed, no garment of two kinds of material. A case about a betrothed slave woman. Fruit trees left unharvested for three years. No eating with blood, no divination. Rules about the cut of hair and beard, about cutting the flesh for the dead, about tattoos. No prostituting a daughter. Sabbath and sanctuary reverence. No mediums. Honor before the gray head. Love the resident foreigner as yourself. Honest weights and measures.

The command Jesus called the second greatest sits between a rule about slander and a rule about mixed fabrics. This is not a scribal accident; it is the chapter's method. The chapter refuses to sort its material into the categories a later reader wants.

Which brings us to the threefold division. Since at least the medieval period, and given its influential Christian form by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae and afterwards by John Calvin and the Reformed confessions, the Mosaic law has commonly been divided into moral, ceremonial, and civil precepts — the moral binding permanently, the ceremonial fulfilled and abrogated, the civil expired with the polity. It is a genuinely useful instrument. It gives Christians a principled way to say why they eat pork and do not steal, and something like it is required by any tradition that holds both that the Torah is Scripture and that Christians are not under all of it.

But three things should be said plainly. First, the division is not in the text. Leviticus 19 does not signal a change of category between verse 18 and verse 19, and no Hebrew term in the chapter distinguishes them; the terms it uses — statute, ordinance, commandment — are applied across the whole range. Second, the division is post-biblical in its developed form, and it is a theological instrument for organizing Christian obedience rather than a descriptive analysis of Israelite law. Third, applying it involves prior judgments that it then appears to justify: one must already have decided that a given command is ceremonial before one can classify it, so the scheme cannot by itself tell you which commands to keep. That circularity is not fatal, but it should be visible. Jewish tradition organizes the same material quite differently, by the enumeration of commandments and by the distinction between statutes for which reasons are given and those for which they are not, and it does not treat any of them as abrogated. Catholic teaching retains the threefold division in a form close to Aquinas's; Reformed teaching in a form close to Calvin's, with the third use of the law attached; Lutheran teaching handles the same problem primarily through law and gospel rather than through the division. Students should know that the framework they inherited is a framework.

Chapters 18 and 20

This is a point where readers will not agree.

Chapters 18 and 20 prohibit a set of sexual relations: with close relatives by blood and marriage, during menstruation, adultery, offering children to Molech, male same-sex intercourse, and bestiality. Chapter 18 states the prohibitions; chapter 20 attaches penalties, several of them capital. The framing in 18:3 contrasts Israel with the practices of Egypt and Canaan, and 18:24-30 warns that the land expels those who defile it.

This is the part of Leviticus with the largest presence in contemporary public argument, and a course of this kind has an obligation to be accurate rather than either evasive or partisan. The named lines of interpretation, stated as their proponents would state them:

The traditional reading, held across Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant teaching until recent decades and still the official position of the largest Christian bodies, takes the prohibitions as expressions of a created order of sexuality that the New Testament reaffirms rather than abrogates, principally in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6. On this reading the ceremonial framing does not make the content ceremonial: the chapter's own reasoning is that these acts defile the land, which is moral-impurity language, not ritual-impurity language, and the prohibitions are addressed to the nations as well as to Israel.

A cultic-context reading, developed in various forms by scholars including Saul Olyan and, in a different key, Phyllis Bird, examines what precisely is prohibited and why, attending to the Hebrew idiom of 18:22, to the position of the verse immediately after the Molech prohibition, and to the priestly concern with mixture and with the improper assignment of social roles. Readings in this family typically conclude that the prohibition is real and specific but that its rationale is bound to a set of concerns — status, boundary, procreative loss, cultic association — that do not transfer straightforwardly to modern questions.

A canonical-development reading, associated in different forms with scholars such as Richard Hays on the traditional side and Luke Timothy Johnson or Walter Wink on the revisionist side, argues about whether the biblical trajectory itself supports revision, on analogy with slavery. Hays argues it does not, and that the New Testament passages are decisive; Wink and others argue that the church has revised its reading of Scripture before on exactly this kind of question and should reason the same way here.

Two observations that belong to a course rather than to a position. First, the argument from ritual impurity — that these prohibitions are of the same order as the shellfish laws — does not work in the simple form in which it is usually offered, for the reason set out in lecture 9-2: chapter 18 uses moral-impurity language and attaches land-defiling consequences, which the food laws do not. That does not settle the modern question; it settles which argument for it fails. Second, and cutting the other way, chapters 18 and 20 also prohibit intercourse during menstruation and prescribe the death penalty for adultery, and Christian communities that treat the chapter as straightforwardly binding do not in practice treat those the same way. Any position on this material owes an account of its own selectivity. Both of those observations are uncomfortable for somebody, which is roughly the sign that they are being reported accurately.

This course does not adjudicate the question. Students will leave holding what their traditions hold, and they should at least be able to state the opposing case in a form its holders would recognize.

Chapter 25: jubilee

Every seventh year the land rests. After seven cycles of seven, the fiftieth year is proclaimed a jubilee: agricultural land reverts to the family that originally held it, and Israelites who have sold themselves into service are released. Sales of land are therefore not sales but leases, priced by the number of harvests remaining until the jubilee (25:15-16). Houses in walled cities are exempt (25:29-30); Levitical property has its own rules.

The premise is stated in 25:23: the land is God's, and Israel holds it as a resident foreigner. The consequence is that permanent alienation of family land is not merely unwise but unavailable, which is a direct constraint on the accumulation that ordinarily follows debt. Note that the jubilee is proclaimed on the Day of Atonement (25:9), tying the economic release to the annual purgation of the sanctuary.

Was it practiced? There is no clear evidence that it was. No narrative in the Hebrew Bible reports a jubilee being observed. The prophets denounce the accumulation of land — Isaiah 5:8 on joining house to house and field to field, Micah 2:2 on seizing fields — which suggests either that the mechanism was not working or that it was not there. Jeremiah 34 records a release of slaves under Zedekiah that was promptly reversed, which is a sabbatical-year provision rather than a jubilee. Later Jewish sources debate the conditions under which the jubilee applies and generally regard it as inoperative in the absence of the full tribal settlement, and some rabbinic discussion assumes it lapsed well before the exile.

What follows? Three readings, and they are not mutually exclusive. It may be a utopian or programmatic text, setting out an ideal by which actual practice is to be judged. It may be a genuine legal provision that failed, which would make it evidence about the gap between Israel's law and Israel's economy rather than about its authors' realism. Or it may be, as some have argued, a late idealization projected backward. What should be resisted is the move that treats the absence of evidence for practice as though it were evidence of insincerity. Legal codes across the ancient Near East contain provisions of debt release — the Mesopotamian misharum edicts, proclaimed by kings on their accession, are the closest parallel and were real acts, if irregular ones — and the jubilee's distinctive feature is that it is calendrical rather than royal. It does not depend on a king's generosity. Whether that made it more or less likely to happen is a fair question.

The chapter has had a long political afterlife: in abolitionist argument, in the American civil rights movement, and in the Jubilee 2000 campaign for the cancellation of the debts of poor countries, which explicitly took its name and its arithmetic from Leviticus 25. Those uses are appropriations rather than exegesis, and they have generally been honest about it.

Chapter 26, and where the book ends

Blessings for obedience occupy thirteen verses; curses for disobedience occupy thirty. The curses escalate in five stages, each introduced by a formula about punishing seven times more, and they end in siege, cannibalism, exile, and a land enjoying the sabbaths it was denied. Formally this resembles the curse sections of ancient Near Eastern treaties, and there are notable verbal similarities to the Assyrian vassal treaties, though the parallels are debated in the same way we saw in lecture 3-3.

Two features are worth noting against the general grim tone. The blessings are headed not by prosperity but by presence — "I will set my tent among you... I will walk among you" (26:11-12), which is the language of Genesis 3 and of the tabernacle, and which closes the circle the book opened with. And the curse section does not end in the curses: 26:40-45 provides for confession, and for God remembering the covenant with Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, and for not utterly rejecting the people even in the land of their enemies. The book proper therefore ends with a conditional restoration rather than a verdict.

Chapter 27, on the valuation of vows and the redemption of things dedicated, comes after this. It is widely regarded as an appendix, and it is hard to fit into any structural account of the book. I said in the chapter overview that a structure requiring you to ignore a book's last chapter has a problem; this is the chapter in question. The honest description is that Leviticus ends twice, and that we do not know why.

The top three panels reproduce the order of Leviticus 19 without rearranging it, so that the reader can see the mixture the chapter actually presents. The lower row applies the moral/ceremonial/civil division to the same chapter and shows the classification as one of many possible ones — which is the point. The scheme sorts the chapter; the chapter does not sort itself.

6. Further Reading

• Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Fortress, 1995).
• Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 and Leviticus 23-27, Anchor Bible 3A and 3B (Doubleday, 2000-2001) — for H as the final editorial layer, and for chapter 25 in detail.
• Baruch J. Schwartz, The Holiness Legislation: Studies in the Priestly Code (Magnes, 1999, in Hebrew; his English essays are widely available) — a dissenting technical voice on the relation of H and P.
• Christophe Nihan, From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study in the Composition of the Book of Leviticus (Mohr Siebeck, 2007) — the fullest recent compositional treatment.
• Saul M. Olyan, "'And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman': On the Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994).
• Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (HarperCollins, 1996), chapter 16 — the traditional case argued at length; read alongside the essays in Homosexuality in the Church, ed. Jeffrey S. Siker (Westminster John Knox, 1994), for the range of positions.
• John E. Hartley, Leviticus, Word Biblical Commentary 4 (Word, 1992) — thorough on the Holiness Code and moderate in its source judgments.
• Jeffrey A. Fager, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee (JSOT Press, 1993), and Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Fortress, 1995) — on jubilee and its Mesopotamian parallels.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, qq. 98-105, and John Calvin, Institutes II.7-8 — the primary sources for the threefold division, worth reading rather than summarizing.