Almost Interesting

I finished Leviticus last night, but again waited to post anything about it. Mostly because I was sleepy and a bit feverish. I’m still feverish, but feeling more up to the challenge of talking about this book. This post is going to be mostly comprised of lists; there really is no story to speak of, what with its being mostly a series of lists itself. Maybe you’ve heard before that Leviticus is the worst book in all the Bible – it was awful, but since I’ve not read past it I cannot yet say. It would be easier to explain what I liked rather than what I didn’t like.

The good:

• Chapter 13,with the exception of verse 12 – It is full of smart ideas about how to contain infectious disease and mildew control, but for some reason v.12 says it’s OK when a skin disease has spread over the whole body. (Perhaps it refers to Vitiligo?)
• 19:9-11, 13-18, 32-26 – These are all about charity, honesty, egalitarianism, and kindness.
• 25:35-37, 39-41 – On not taking advantage of the downtrodden

The almost-good (i.e. heart’s in the wrong place):

• 19:29 & 31 – Don’t pimp your daughter or everyone will start doing it! (And property values will go down?) & Fortune-tellers are bad not because they’re full of shit, but because they’ll sully you.

LOLs:

• 18:6 – At this point, God starts saying, “I am the LORD,” at the end of random sentences, repetition becoming more frequent as the book wears on. It seemed to me a very silly thing to say, like when Invader Zim yells, “I AM ZIM!” or when a dumb character in a TV show, pretending to be someone s/he is not, will constantly and without prompting affirm their supposed identity.
• 18:21 note (in NIV)

– 18:21 is another piece of good advice with a bad reason: do not sacrifice your children to another magical fairy because the magical fairy you already worship will be disrespected. I found the note in my Bible ridiculous because it calls the sacrifice of young humans “detestable” but is a constant apologetic for the sacrifice of non-humans.

And everything else was pure horror. The first part is about how to go about ritual sacrifice of various animals, how to dismember them, and which are the proper ways to play with the blood and parts thereof. Then it discusses the ordination of Aaron and his sons (with more unnecessary gore). After this the laws of kashrut are laid down, misogynistic vagina-hating, disease control, ritual cleansing, holidays, more laws and regulations for priests, and punishments (either death or banishment; they weren’t very creative about abuse when it wasn’t about animal dismemberment or playing in blood).

I have specific examples of things which stuck with me, too.

Outlandish punishments for non-crimes:

• 10:1-2 – Two of Aaron’s sons are burned to death for using incense at a time God didn’t approve of.
• Chapter 20 – Death or banishment for petty offenses and non-crimes.
• 24:10-23 – A man is stoned for blasphemy, despite a little bit of lip service paid to justice in 24:17-22. They make a big deal of treating all people the same, even those they do not view as one of them, much in the same way a homophobe will repeatedly remind you of “all [their] gay friends.”

  Furthermore, the man in question is as one of them as Ephraim and Manasseh – half Egyptian, half Israelite – why, because his mother is a Danite and his father Egyptian instead of the other way around, should he have been so excluded? It is utter ridiculousness.

Crazy superstitious nonsense:

• Chapter 14 – Following the useful (perhaps even insightful) chapter 13 is a list of different animals to maim (and instructions, too) in order to atone for the sin that caused the illness.
• 26:4 – Appeasing God for rain.
• 26:14-46 – If bad things happen to you, it’s because you’ve displeased the Magical Sky Fairy. The reverse is obviously true, as well.
• 26:22, 29, 39, 40 – Foolish punishment of descendants for the sin of an ancestor.

Woman-hating:

• 15:19-24 – Anything a menstruating woman sits on will be “unclean” (They mean in the religious sense, not physically… What did they use in lieu of tampons back then, anyway?)
• 15:25-30 – Claims that there is something wrong with a woman whose period is longer than what others would consider normal. Clearly she is sick and this is tantamount to sin, so more birds are to have their heads twisted off.
• 18:19 – Ew! Period! I’m really starting to think that modern-day silliness about the menstrual cycle is a direct result of the enshrining of this Bronze-Age bullshit.
• 19:20-22 – You can rape an engaged slave so long as you have a ram for the priests to brutally murder and dismember.
• 21:13-15 – Priests are to only marry virgins because for some reason his children will be unclean if the vagina he buys isn’t shrink-wrapped.

Other bigotry:

• 18:22 & 20:13 – Inciting anti-gay violence
• 21:16-23 – Ableism; anybody who is a little person, has an impairment, missing limb, etc is considered defective and is not fit to be a bloodthirsty butcher priest, despite being a descendant of Aaron.

God ≠ smart:

• Chapter 14, 15, elsewhere – Mentioned again because God is the one pushing the idea that sickness is a transgression and requires ritual cleansing. If he created everything, surely he’d have an idea as to how disease and infection works.
• 20:20, 21 – Claims that if you have sex with and/or marry your sister-in-law or aunt that you will both be childless. Um… this one is only too easy to prove false.
• 25:1-7 – Every seventh year, no crops are to be planted. (God provides three years worth of food in the sixth year so nobody will starve.) The wisdom in this is clear, the practice of crop rotation has been done for ages to avoid soil nutrient depletion. However, God could’ve used his supposedly infinite knowledge of the planet he created and told them that planting legumes would’ve restored them. (Come to think of it, why doesn’t God reveal anything useful, like how to cure polio or germ theory?)

God reaffirming he loves slavery:

• 25:44-46 – In Exodus, God laid down rules for enslaving Hebrews and how they are to be treated. Here it is made abundantly clear that he sanctions the practice, so long as the slave-to-be is not an Israelite.

So yeah, that’s Leviticus in a nutshell. A dash of goodness in a stew of superstition-fueled psychotic bloodletting masquerading as holy writ. It’s horrible and I hope that people are right and it is the worst book in the Bible so I won’t have to endure such a disgusting reading experience ever again.