Engaging Leviticus

Mark W. Elliott’s Engaging Leviticus is a compendium of historical commentary on the book of Leviticus. Organized chapter-by-chapter, Elliott draws together patristic, medieval, and modern commentators, mostly Christian but including some Jewish commentators along the way.

That organization creates some difficulties for the reader. Elliott’s book is packed with information, but there is little analysis of the overall shape of the interpretive tradition. If you want to know what commentators have said about the purification of women after childbirth (Leviticus 12) or Jubilee (chapter 25), you’ll find it in the appropriate chapters. If you want to know how patristic commentary differed from Carolingian or scholastic, the information will be much more difficult to discover. There’s no real flow to the book; it reads like a commentary, which is what it is!

If the book’s organization is kept in view, this is a tremendously helpful resource for students of Leviticus and of Scripture as a whole. And some general conclusions emerge from the book. For starters, we can learn that Leviticus was the subject of more devoted attention than we might have expected. For another, that attention is not, as we might expect, purely “spiritual” or allegorical. Commentators frequently draw ecclesiological and liturgical import from the institutions and rituals found in Leviticus. The persistence of “churching of women” is one obvious example, and one that outlived even the upheavals of the Reformation, and the various purification washings were connected to baptism and penance. After the Reformation, Catholics parried the Protestant charge of “judaizing” by claiming that one can perform the ceremonies of the law without doing in the spirit of the law. It is a bit of a shock to discover John Knox deleting the category of performative utterance from Leviticus and the church by claiming that priests never effected defilement or purification but merely stated what was already the case. It would be intriguing to read the Reformation as a contest over the liturgical and ecclesiological import of Leviticus. There was, as we’d expect, an ongoing debate about the importance of the literal sense of Leviticus.

At the same time, there are some surprising omissions in the interpretive tradition. Elliott shows that Leviticus 2 was often interpreted as an allegory of Christian experience (the cooking oil is the Spirit, the baking of bread persecution or trials), and not always with the Eucharistic focus we might have expected. It’s not until the early seventeenth century that a Eucharistic interpretation of the grain offering comes into its own. Elliott, surprisingly, finds little discussion of Christ as a priest in early treatments of Leviticus, and few pick up on the “eighth day” thematic in the rite for priestly ordination (Leviticus 8-9). 

With their diligent attention to details, premodern interpreters highlight some critical insights into the “mechanics” of sacrifice. It was commonly observed, for instance, that the “memorial” of the grain offering was a “reminder” to God and not merely to the worshiper. Some commentators anticipated Jacob Milgrom’s insights into the role of contrition and repentance in the sacrificial system. Cyril already sees the link between the inspections for house leprosy in Leviticus 14 and Jesus’ declaration of doom over the temple in the gospels, and several commentators followed this lead.

One complaint about the book: The bibliography is incomplete. A number of times, I looked to the back to follow up a parenthetical citation in the text, only to discover that the source text was not in the bibliography.