" and I sincerely doubt you ever will! You blow off anything, everything that contradicts your pet homosexual website and delude your self into thinking just because some homosexual says it on his website, it must be true.
Here is a current day Jewish Rabbi and professor informing us of the historical context of Leviticus. You will notice that he refers to the same source I use, the Talmud. And I cannot find one reference to "homosexual rape,""temple prostitution," or any of the other excuses people conjure up trying to legitimize sin that God condemns.
The Sacred and the Mundane: The Message of Leviticus
by Peter J. Haas
Peter J. Haas is an ordained rabbi and associate professor of Jewish thought and literature in the department of religious studies at Vanderbilt University. This article appeared in The Christian Century, October 8, 1997, pp. 877-882. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at
www.christiancentury.org. This article prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.
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And yet Leviticus is central, literally and figuratively, to what the Pentateuch is all about. The Pentateuch is the story of how the people of Israel came into being and came to receive their gift of the Promised Land. Genesis and Exodus introduce us to the story and bring us to its crucial turning point, the arrival at Sinai and the reception of the Revelation. Numbers and Deuteronomy complete the narrative, describing the experiences and lessons of the people as they leave Sinai and finally arrive at the edge of the Promised Land. In the middle stands Leviticus. Leviticus lets us pause and consider the content of the Revelation. It offers instruction in the technology of the holyinstruction that will shape the divine service in the temple and the rhythm and content of Israels holy life after it enters the land.
It is easy for us to skip over Leviticus because it appears so utterly foreign. The very institutions that Leviticus presupposesthe temple and its levitical priesthoodare completely alien to us, whether we are Jewish or Christian. To be sure, all Western religious traditions draw heavily on the vocabulary and symbolism of Leviticus: priesthood (whether clergy or "of the people"), sacrifice, offerings, uncleanness, purification, ablution/baptism, the redeeming power of blood, and on and on. But these are all bits and pieces of the levitical system taken out of their original context and transformed into the very different framework of church and synagogue. It is only in Leviticus that these elements come together naturally to form a comprehensive and coherent system.
How did the priests, Levites and commoners of that time understand what they were doing, and what does their understanding mean for us today? Adducing and communicating this understanding is the job of modern critical commentaries like Erhard S. Gerstenbergers. They take on the difficult if not impossible task of preserving the foreignness of Leviticus while still making it relevant.
There seems to be a scholarly consensus that the Book of Leviticus, more or less as we have it, is from exilic times. The generally agreed-upon context is the permission given by Cyrus of Persia (in approximately 538 B.C.E.) to the exiled Judeans to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. We know from archaeological evidence that Cyrus allowed a number of conquered peoples to rebuild their homelands and local temples. In each of these cases he required the newly re-established priesthood to publish its traditional law. Leviticus, in this scholarly view, is the result of the Judean priesthoods effort to do so. This is why Leviticus (and the "P" document generally) reads like a priestly handbook. It was composed to inform Cyrus and his officials about what the Jerusalem priesthood intended to do with its newly granted authority.
This historical context does not mean, however, that scholars think Leviticus was made up out of whole cloth by exiled priests in the sixth century B.C.E. No doubt the priestly writers brought to their task memories or traditions of what once had been and so should be again. It is also clear that the book was not written at one sitting by a single author. Leviticus has every sign of being a composite work.
It is best, then, to think of Leviticus as a complex document written over an extended period of time (the rebuilding of the temple took nearly 25 years) by a variety of authors. It should not be treated as an historically reliable description of how the temple actually operated. Whether or not the Second Temple ever followed this blueprint exactly is an interesting question, but one that goes beyond the purview of this essay. But it is evident that in its details, Leviticus offers remarkable insight into the priestly imagination of exilic and postexilic Judah. It tells us what the priesthood, or at least an influential part of it, thought temple ritual ought to be.
Leviticus can be divided into two major parts. The first (chapters 1-16) is concerned with the operation of the priesthood and proper disposition of the sacrifices and offerings brought to the altar. The second (chapters 17-26) has to do with the maintenance of a certain purity or holiness by the Judean community as a whole. This holiness is deemed necessary if the temple and its sacred altar are to abide in the land.
Historically there have been three ways of approaching the rather technical material in the portion of Leviticus that deals with sacrifice. The first is best exemplified in rabbinic writings, especially the Mishnab and Talmud. This approach tries to work out the legal intricacies of the rules for sacrifice, to fill in the gaps and reconcile the inconsistencies embedded in the text: for example, determining the status of an animal designated for one type of sacrifice but erroneously slaughtered for another; or determining what to do if an animal that has been properly slaughtered and its blood correctly sprinkled on the altar is then found to have a blemish that should have disqualified it.
The second method for understanding sacrifice rules is what we might call the "history of religions" approach. The focus here is on how such religious rituals work on a deeper structural level. In this view, Leviticus is one example among many. In all religions priestly rituals are designed to overcome basic contradictions. In biblical Israel the contradiction consists of the fact that the most virulent sources of impurity are diseased and dead bodies and things pertaining thereto: bones, blood and the like. But to do their holy jobs, the priests must slaughter animals, sprinkle their blood on the altar, and burn and eat various portions of the carcasses. In classic religious fashion, that which is most dangerous and polluting is transformed by the proper ministrations of members of a holy caste ("priests" in this case) into a potent source of sanctity and holiness. The object of scholarship is to uncover the logic according to which this transvaluation occurs. According to the history-of-religions school, Leviticus tells us how this mythic transformation was understood in biblical Israel.
The third approach is to treat Leviticus as a symbolic or allegorical system that has little or nothing to do with sacrifices per se, but everything to do with teaching important lessons. Early use of this allegorical approach may be found in the work of Philo in the first century of the Common Era. An exemplary expression of this method is the work of Samson Raphael Hirsch, a mid-l9th-century Orthodox rabbi. In his interpretation, the offering ("korban," in Hebrew) is a means of getting close ("karob") to God; the whole-offering is the offering that one gives wholeheartedlythat is, with complete devotion. It must be without blemish to stress that our efforts to approach God come from strength and certainty, not weakness or compromise. An advantage of this approach is that it allows the book to "preach." One can find in the minutiae of the ancient priests daily routine some guidance and inspiration for our lives today. This approachs disadvantage is that it strips the text of any historical meaning.
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2
