wolfbiblemoon

God details what his people get for following all those rules and what they will be subjected to if they refuse to follow.

* Some seriously awful punishments for not following God's rules to the letter, talk about using the fear of God to control your people. Interestingly a lot less space is used to detail the rewards for following the rules, God prefers the stick to the carrot I guess.

And that's the end of Leviticus.

I'm not feeling well today so I can't be bothered with too much in depth analysis, but as these two chapters are pretty much repetition of previous chapters then I've already covered most of it.

More laws, things you can atone for with animal sacrifice and some good old abominations.

* Aaron has to atone for the sins of his two sons that were already killed by God for their inability to follow the complicated sacrifice procedure exactly right. A bit like putting someone to death for jay walking and then expecting their family to serve jail time.

* Apparently this is the source of the word 'scapegoat'. The scapegoat is a goat which gets to live (unlike its brother) but has to take with it the sins of Aaron and his people on its head.

* Seems vampires are to be reviled because of the contents of this section, anyone who eats blood should be cut off from his people for 'the life of the flesh is in the blood' (pretty much the classic Dracula line!)

* God basically condemns nearly every human that has been born so far (in the bible) by declaring marriage/sex between close relatives (or their wives) an abomination. They've all been doing it, so why the sudden declaration? It's not explained, just more 'I'm God, I said it, so follow it'. However, multiple marriages are still fine, judging from the mentions of 'thy father's wife' and 'thy father's wife's daughter'.

* Ah, most infamous of Leviticus' many abominations, lying with mankind as with womankind. It's often picked out from amongst the rest of the rules and paraded about as the judgement of God and used to justify the anti-gay rights movement while the rest of the acts that God finds equally abominable are just ignored. And I don't see any of those people sacrificing tonnes of animals, which was apparently a statute for ever.

Here's a clip from The West Wing which articulates my feelings far better than I can!

God displays a laughable lack of knowledge about the animals he created, hates new mothers and details symptoms of infectious diseases with great authority.

* Animals are declared clean or unclean using seemingly random rules and depends on things like hoof type, feeding habits and how they walk. Particularly ignorant classifications include bats being in with the birds and insects having 4 legs.

Something that grates on me is that these rules are arbitrarily declared as rules that must be followed because God said them, and the only reason for even the most random rules are just that God said them. Not very satisfying, why follow rules that have no real purpose?

* Leviticus 12 is another good solid family values chapter, giving birth makes a woman unclean for 2 weeks if the baby is a girl and just one week for a new baby boy. They have to follow purifying rituals for one or two months.

* A whole chapter on how to recognise Leprosy, seems like it would have been useful to the people at the time, identifying infectious diseases is important to protect the population. I even think that keeping the afflicted in isolation to ensure the symptoms don't worsen is commendable. However, the chapter is rather ruined by talk of declaring those infected with Leprosy unclean.

Some of the animal sacrifices have a greater purpose than being demanded by God, if you sacrifice a particular animal (according to your status) then you will be forgiven your sins. That's right, innocent animals are killed for minor sins committed by humans. And only the priests get to eat certain parts, the same priests who are related to Moses, still the only person to talk to God and come up with rules about how to make dinner for a priest properly sacrifice these animals.