Leviticus and Numbers

Athalya Brenner, Archie Chi Chung Lee, Athalya Brenner, Archie Chi Chung Lee

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780800699369
• eBook ISBN: 9781451426335
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Texts @ Contexts series gathers scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light. Leviticus and Numbers focuses attention on practices and ideals of behavior in community, from mourning and diet to marriages licit and transgressive, examining all of these from a variety of global perspectives and postcolonial and feminist methods. How do we deal with the apparent cultural distances between ourselves and these ancient writings; what can we learn from their visions of human dwelling on the earth?

Like other volumes in the Texts @ Contexts series, these essays de-center the often homogeneous first-world orientation of much biblical scholarship and open up new possibilities for discovery.

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Issues in Leviticus

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Landed Interpretation

An Environmental Ethicist Reads Leviticus

Kristel A. Clayville

Landed Context

The title of this essay is a little misleading, suggesting that I write from a single location, when in fact my training in multiple disciplines gives me liminal academic status. I am not only an environmental ethicist; I am a former biblicist and archaeologist who has chosen ethics as her academic home because it is an ideal place for posing questions about ancient texts and modern life. I was raised in the Disciples of Christ, a low-church Protestant denomination that developed in rural Kentucky and whose sole article of faith is, “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible.”^[1] I was always more comfortable with the second half of that statement of belief, and so I organized my studies around archaeological and textual studies of the Bible. Thus I am an environmental ethicist with training in critical methods of engagement with the Hebrew Bible, and one who has gotten her hands dirty at the archaeological sites of Castra, Ein Gedi, Sepphoris, and Kirbet Cana.

Not only do I have a liminal academic context, but I also have a liminal personal context. I spent my early years in Kentucky, where the Appalachian Mountains give us a different view of what is possible. There is quite a bit of both looking up and climbing up to be done, but there are also physical barriers to vision and long paths around mountains to be plotted. The mountains form a culture by isolation, but also by nourishment. And so I have a strong sense of the constructive force that place has in making people who they are, both socially and religiously. I come from the blending of two farming families, and I was always aware that my parents had chosen to leave the life of the land. My liminality comes from having one foot in the modern world, full of its technological advances, and one foot in an older, almost tribal culture that prioritizes kinship ties and insider status while shirking much of what the modern world has to offer. It is no small wonder that I, having been formed in this environment, gravitate toward environmental ethics. I was reared with a love of nature, skepticism toward modern inventions, and an emphasis on the Bible. Bringing all of these parts of myself together without demonizing any one of them has been part of my long academic journey.

In addition to living in this liminal space academically and personally, I also inhabit it legally. As a woman married to a woman, my travels from place to place result in legal confusion. Am I in a state that recognizes the legal standing of my relationship? Do the state laws or the city laws govern my relationship at this time? These questions and others plague my movements and push me to think critically about place and its relationship to law. I am often put in the position of asking the question, Where am I? as the necessary precursor to, Who am I?—at least in relation to the other people of the lands that I traverse. This liminal legal status allows me to think of myself analogically as a ger in the land of Israel, who in Lev. 19:33 is extended the courtesy of legal standing. Yet the explicit mention suggests that the people did not simply assume the legal standing of strangers.

Of course, my marriage is also a contentious subject religiously. My social location pushes back against that simple reading: “No book but the Bible,” forcing an abundance of meaning for me or no meaning at all. I cannot read the statement as reductionistically limiting my own self-definition, but rather, I must engage the Bible as a polyphonous text, polyvalent and overflowing with meaning. In an effort to preserve meaning, I develop interpretations of the biblical text that honor my own investment in it but that don’t result in self-immolation. To this end, I often rely on an intertwining of premodern interpretive principles with the historical-critical method. Or more to the point, I embrace the Documentary Hypothesis while also affirming the superabundance of meaning within the biblical text. In short, an interweaving of my personal and academic contexts shapes my relationship to the biblical text and influences my reading.

My own commitments to the biblical text do not allow me to ignore Leviticus, but in fact demand that I engage it to bring about meaning in a modern, liminal context. Scholars have recognized Leviticus as a treasure trove of information on ancient Israelite cultic practice, family organization, legal reasoning, and social ethics (for instance, Douglas 2002 [1966] and Milgrom 2004). Yet much of the significance of this text has been relegated to informing how we think about the past. In fact, the Revised Common Lectionary includes only selections from Leviticus 19, and in public debates one hears only citations of the antihomosexuality passages (Lev. 18:22; 20:13). In many ways, the content of Leviticus has determined not only our approaches to the text but also what we expect to be the fruitful significance of any of our readings of it. Yet when Leviticus is read from an environmental ethics perspective, it proves to be a valuable source for cultivating an ecological imagination, which gives a historically specific religious text a constructive voice in contemporary environmental ethics.

While the entire text of Leviticus can be read from an environmental ethics perspective, I will limit myself to the Holiness Code (chs. 17–27), due to the specific references to land and family in that section. As mentioned, previous studies of Leviticus have argued that the text doesn’t have any contemporary relevance. We can only glean more information about the ancient cult, family structure, or legal reasoning, objects of study that are really only of academic interest. But within the Holiness Code, the content specifically about the land is a good starting place for interpreting the text to speak to a modern context. My approach locates the significance in our modern context rather than gleaning information about social history. Before narrowing this study to focus on the Holiness Code, however, I will go into more detail about what reading from an environmental ethics perspective means for my approach to the text.

Landed Reading

Environmental ethics is a broad field of study. It includes animal studies, sustainability studies, ecojustice, and ecotheology, just to name a few subfields. The overarching thematic unity of all these studies is that they investigate and make normative claims about the human relationship to nature. Within these studies, scholars must define humans and nature, as well as the unit of moral considerability for each. Does human mean “individuals,” or does it refer to a group? Are animals individuals that need to be protected, or do their habitats simply need to be protected? Is nature composed of individuals or species? Will normative judgments be based on value theory, on the preservation of human freedom, on theological principles, on the premise of limiting the aggregate amount of suffering in the world? These are only a few of the various options available to environmental ethicists, who engage conceptually and practically with the relationships between living entities in the world. While environmental ethicists interpret the world using these questions and categories (among others), these questions and categories need not be relegated to this one academic sphere. We can borrow these questions and concepts to orient our reading of the Holiness Code.

Certain assumptions about the world are embedded in these questions and concepts; so we must ask, what does asking these questions and using these concepts imply about the biblical text? First, it implies that the text has an ethical outlook and is seeking to regulate behavior. Given that Leviticus is a legal text including apodictic and casuistic laws, considering it to have an ethical outlook does not seem like much of a stretch. The difficulty lies in seeing these apodictic and casuistic formulations as part of a larger ethical outlook that includes the deontological elements drawn from them, but that is not defined by them. This larger and encompassing ethical outlook leads to the second point; namely, the main topic of Leviticus is the human relationship to nature. Asserting such a claim means that the creation of holy space is a subcategory of this larger theme. Third, importing questions and concepts from environmental ethics in reading Leviticus suggests that the referents in the text have real-world analogues. Since the questions and concepts were formulated to navigate relationships between real-world entities, one may assume that using them would make a similar claim about the text of Leviticus—that, in fact, it makes claims about the world as it exists and ought to exist rather than about a merely textual world or the world described in the text, which is a world we do not physically inhabit. With Leviticus, this is not a pressing concern. The text contains mainly objects, animals, and categories of people that we would find in our everyday lives,^[2] even in a modern context. The normative ethical warrant is presented as an imitative theological model,^[3] which could confound the idea that objects in the text have real-world analogues. But my reading of the Holiness Code does not rely on that theological context for ethical grounding. Rather, I contend that this theological warrant frames the entire ethical outlook of the text, adding a layer of normativity instead of defining the contours of normativity. Within that theological framing, there is still the need to further investigate the kinds of relationships presented.

In short, reading from an environmental ethics perspective shifts the kinds of questions that we ask of the Holiness Code. Rather than asking questions driven by the historical particularity of the text, we can formulate questions about the relationships between human and nonhuman entities, values embedded in the text, and duties prescribed by the text. While I have outlined some of the broad questions and concepts that will orient reading the Holiness Code from an environmental ethics perspective, we can narrow into a particular environmental perspective that is consonant with the concerns and worldview of the Holiness Code, namely, the Land Ethic, an approach to thinking about nature that focuses on ecosystems as the locus of value rather than human interests or individual animals.

Aldo Leopold, the founder of the Land Ethic,^[4] has been called a prophet by many later thinkers. J. Baird Callicott offers two reasons for this: “Leopold studied the Bible, not as an act of faith, but as a model of literary style. . . . And he thought far ahead of his time” (Callicott 1999: 7). The consonance of the worldviews of the Holiness Code and the Land Ethic could be attributed to Leopold’s study of the Bible (1989)—after all, it is hard to ignore content even if one is reading only for literary style. If this is so, then contrary to Callicott’s characterization of Leopold’s prophetic abilities, it is not his forward thinking or prognostications about the future that make him a prophet, but rather his backward gaze to a past that articulated an ethical model with potential in a contemporary situation. Leopold as prophet reinvigorates an ethical worldview from the biblical text that has lost force in the modern world. Like the biblical prophets, he looks not simply to the future but also to the past for models of ethical action that can be given new life.^[5]

Leopold articulated the Land Ethic based on his observations and interactions with the ecology around his farm in Wisconsin. These observations and interactions are organized by month, so the changing seasons and the cyclical nature of time are built into Leopold’s experiences. Leopold’s presentation of time in his writing is not unlike the Levitical model of cyclical time governed by ritual. Additionally, Leopold’s Land Ethic espouses an ecological holism, meaning that the unit of moral considerability is the whole, not the part or the individual. Leviticus also concerns itself mainly with the whole—that is, the community of the Israelites—and the land itself. Again and again we see in the text that individuals who are considered טמא, tame’ (“impure”), are segregated from the community until they can regain their טהור, ṭahor (“pure”), status. And if becoming ṭahor again is not possible, then the individuals are excommunicated for the sake of the holiness of the community. Temporality and community focus are not the only overlaps between the Levitical worldview and that of Leopold’s Land Ethic. As we will see, the Holiness Code can be read as embodying the logic of ethical development and the warrant for extending the community that funds the Land Ethic, but further explication of the logical structure of the Land Ethic is needed before we proceed.

Leopold summarizes his Land Ethic with the moral maxim: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold 1989: 224–25). This summary comes after pages and pages detailing his interactions with the land and his experiences with it over multiple seasons. Land is not the only subject of Leopold’s ethics, but it is the largest part. One of the main questions that leads scholars to dismiss the Land Ethic is Leopold’s lack of definition for the term “biotic community.” Does it reference a whole (rather than an individual), and how would we value a system?

Callicott, one of the few academic proponents of the Land Ethic, attributes much of the dismissal to Leopold’s concise writing style. Callicott offers an interpretation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table Of Contents
• Copyright
• Other Books in the Series
• Series Preface
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Issues in Leviticus
• Issues in Numbers
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Scripture Index