Ritual and Text

Recent studies of the Levitical system have questioned the “facile” links that commentators draw “between its ritual instructions and narratives, its theology, and Israel’s ritual practices” (James Watts, Ritual and Rhetoric in Leviticus, 15).

Citing William Gilders (Blood Ritual in the Hebrew Bible) and Wesley Bergen (Reading Ritual), he elaborates, “Both noted the paucity of symbolic
interpretations of ritual in biblical texts and criticized the tendency of
biblical scholars to regard rituals as having only one meaning, which
proper textual exegesis can expose. They argued instead that interpreters
must take seriously the fact that rituals are usually multivocal
and ambiguous, that is, they mean different things to different people
and often convey no clearly articulated symbolism to those who participate
in them. They also pointed out the methodological stumbling
block that ancient texts present to ritual interpretation: Gilders noted, ‘Interpreting a textually represented ritual requires attention to the text as well as to the ritual. Both must be interpreted. . . . For this reason,
we must distinguish carefully between the ‘world of the text’ and a
living, historical context in which ritual activity takes place.’”

Gilder and Bergen tried to avoid these problems by adopting alternative methods: “Gilders focused on the indexical
meaning of ancient Israel’s blood rituals, which is their significance
for indicating the status and changes in status of ritual participants,
especially the priests. Bergen used performance theories of rituals to
make a similar point, that the meaning of the ritual can be found only
by participating in it. He argued, however, that the textualization of
ritual in Leviticus resulted in ritualized reading taking the place of
ritual offerings: ‘Thus, the textualization of the ritual is balanced by
the ritualization of the text. . . . So there is no loss of ritual, only its
transformation’” (14-15).

Watts is particularly hard on Mary Douglas’s late Leviticus as Literature: “Her analysis of Leviticus provides a rather extreme example of mixing
textual meaning and ritual significance and folding both into a theological
superstructure provided by the interpreter” (17). He accuses Douglas of seeming “quite unconcerned with, if not aware of, methodological conflicts” between the approaches she combines in her book. 

One should be cautious before accusing Mary Douglas of methological naivete. One might also point to the title of Douglas’s book, which seems to make sufficiently clear that her interest is in the text.

I suspect, further, that the reason methodological cautions fall on deaf ears has to do with the purposes of the commentators on Leviticus. If one is interested in trying to figure out what ancient Israelites actually did, and how those rites changed and developed, then these cautions are essential. Most commentators are less interested in ancient ritual or religious practice than they are in expounding Leviticus for a present community of faith. In that setting, the texutalization of Israel’s rituals is taken for granted without much thought, and readers proceed to puzzle out something edifying from the text they’ve inherited. 

This is an anthropological point: Readers of Leviticus are themselves situated, and their readings have a function and logic within the ritual community of which they are a part.