In this series, I examine each book of the Bible for its healing insights. Especially if you’ve lived through trauma and/or seek relief from suffering, you might find these essays helpful, for their blend of personal experience and scriptural analysis. Here you’ll find every essay in the series.
Leviticus, the third book in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, begins with instruction on how to prepare a burnt offering to God, continues with a laundry list of rules for proper living in the ancient Near East, and ends with guidelines for dedicating gifts to the sanctuary.
So what healing wisdom can it give us?
Leviticus follows Exodus, which tells the story of God leading the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. Their emancipation doesn’t mean it’s time for a big party in the desert, though they did try that! It’s time for Israelites to get serious about who they are and how God wants them to live: with moral integrity. Leviticus is the new rules set for a free people.
You shall be holy
One area where Israelites differed among religions in the ancient Near East is in the concept of holy purification as something the Lord invites his people to share with Him. We might see this as a way for God to restore the Israelites after their long bondage. From Leviticus:
I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy. Neither shall you defile yourselves with any creeping thing that creeps on the earth. For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. (11:44-45)
That’s how we might take the ritual cleansing aspects of Leviticus—as invitations to purify our bodies—to regard them and treat them with holy integrity.
Parents who commit the crimes of neglect, assault, and rape against their own children often project the shame of those crimes onto their kids. We feel it in our bodies and can associate our bodies with the crimes. If this is you, it might help counter that shame to think of yourself as holy, made in the image of the divine.
Apologies for real
Just as our bodies can be made holy with God, so can our hearts and minds, through ritualized atonement. There’s the grain offering; the peace, sin, and trespass offerings; and finally, the offerings with restitution. All of these commanded ritual offerings were to be made regularly, as part of the fabric of the lives of the Israelites. They served to make people aware of their tendency toward specific points of behavior that are bad for the tribe and bad for society in general. The offerings provided a set structure for recognition of these wrongs and regular atonement for them.
While Jesus’ sacrifice brought an end to the need for these ritual offerings for Christians, it’s worth looking at the unique power of this structure in Leviticus.
In our modern age, we’ve practically lost the idea that human beings are given to sin but might atone for these sins. Think about this: The phrase “I’m sorry” used to be an apology, but now it’s mainly used as a way to express sympathy, as in “I’m sorry you didn’t win the gold, but at least you snagged the silver.”
But what if we instead took “I’m sorry” back? What if we prioritized its arguably more important use as a vehicle for atonement?
There’s a beautiful example of this in “The Chosen,” when former tax collector-now-disciple Matthew finally apologizes to Peter for his treatment of him. I’ve cued the below video for the setup to the apology itself, but it’s worth watching the entire video (20 mins) for the full sweep of the relationship.
Notably, Jesus says, “Matthew, you don’t apologize to be forgiven. You apologize to repent.” Think about how the word “repent” has fallen out of favor in our modern world, like an antiquated notion. Does anyone ever repent anymore? He goes on, “Forgiveness is a gift given from the other person.”
When’s the last time you issued a heartfelt apology to someone you hurt? When’s the last time you received one? In the absence of an apology, it can be hard to forgive, yet we are often commanded by others to forgive first, before repentance and atonement have been made, or even acknowledgment of the wrong itself.
Almost as bad as no apology at all is the non-apology: “I’m sorry you took that the wrong way,” or “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
While the practice of using offerings as a way to express atonement for sins is practically nonexistent now, it was unique even amongst the beliefs and rituals of the ancient Near East. While animal sacrifice was common, the reasons to make an offering to a deity in other belief systems differed considerably. According to The IVP Bible Background Commentary1:
In some cultures sacrifice was viewed as a means of caring for the deity by providing food. Others saw the sacrifice as a gift to please the god and request his aid. (Walton 120)
Where the Israelites and their compatriots overlapped was in the offerings serving to forge or cement a relationship between them and their deity, but unlike other ancient people, the Israelites were not “feeding” God in exchange for favors: “It is clear that the Israelites were not to consider sacrifices as food needed by God” (122).
People who’ve been victimized, especially as children—we could take comfort in a rules-based society that spells out that the wrongs committed against us are wrongs, and they require redress. Not vengeance, but voluntary repentance and atonement.
The sex stuff and more
Rules, repentance, atonement, and forgiveness become even more explicit on the subject of sexual integrity.
Imagine a time or place in which it must be spelled out that it’s wrong to engage in sex acts with family members or animals, prostitute your children, or murder your own infant child as a sacrifice to a god.
All of these practices are condemned in Leviticus for two reasons: 1) they make God’s people unclean, or defile us and 2) they are not healthy acts for a good society or tribe: “Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for by all these the nations are defiled” (18:24).
While incest taboos are common worldwide, they were ignored in ancient Egypt and have been likewise sidestepped throughout history in order to preserve royal lineages. As another exception to the common taboo, Ancient Persian culture regarded marriage to a daughter, sister, or mother as acceptable enough that it constituted a pious act (Walton 135). By contrast, to the Israelites, such pairings would “undermine the family, the foundational element of Israelite society. To undermine the family was to undermine the covenant” (135).
Ritual or magical practices involving bestiality have been found in evidence in the ancient Near East (133). In fact, a good deal of the sexual acts outlawed in Leviticus link specifically to pagan rituals: “Temple personnel included male and female prostitutes” (my emphasis, 133), and there was also the practice of selling, indenturing, or donating your children for such service as a form of tithe.
Even infanticide needed to be explicitly discouraged. “You should not let any of your descendants pass through the fire to Molech” (Leviticus 18:21). This isn’t just metaphor:
Evidence of child sacrifice has been recovered from Phoenician sites in North Africa (Carthage) and Sardinia, and it was also practiced in Syria and Mesopotamia during the Assyrian period (eighth and seventh centuries B.C.) […] Many consider Molech to be a netherworld deity whose worship featured rituals with Canaanite origins focusing on dead ancestors. (Walton 132)
So faith in God presented a radically new way of life that greatly distinguished Israelites from other people. Reading Leviticus now, we can appreciate the commandments in that context—not just because yay, we live in a world that regards these egregious acts as criminal and prosecutable, but because faith in God requires drawing a hard line against the brutal harm of innocents.
God commands us to respect the innocence of animals and children and to protect them from abuse and mistreatment. This requires our own moral integrity, and it requires us to demand it in others as well instead of avoiding, excusing, or even enabling bad acts.
Get your scapegoat
One of the most curious elements of Leviticus is the use of a scapegoat during atonement—and here I’ll present the basic premise and modern manifestation of it and then open it up to you for comment.
In the Day of Atonement ritual, the priest casts lots between two goats. One is sacrificed, and the other is offered to the Lord alive to act as a scapegoat for the tribe’s sins:
Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, concerning all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and shall send it away into the wilderness” (16:20).
Leviticus isn’t the only reference to scapegoating from the time period. Other cultures of the ancient Near East (Mesopotamians and Hittites, to name two) also practiced ritual scapegoating. However, the most common motivation for sending a goat into the wilderness as a sacrifice was to appease an evil spirit or deity. Rather than placing the tribe’s own sins onto the head of a goat, most other ancient people were merely deflecting evil forces toward the goat. These rituals also accompanied incantations—magic workings Israelites never used.
To be a scapegoat in a dysfunctional family is to be the one the family has outcast, placing all of its sins on the unwitting scapegoat. For example, there’s a whole Substack devoted to the dynamic of “family scapegoating abuse.” These stories sometimes speak to me, as my own family engages in scapegoating, with both me and my youngest brother as the exiled goats.
Have you been made into the family scapegoat? What unexamined sins within the family might be projected onto you—as a way to avoid repentance and atonement?
Here’s what else I’m mulling over: I think it’s possible that humans have a natural tendency toward scapegoating, as a means not of atoning for our sins but shirking our duty to atone for them. My two pieces of evidence for this are 1) other ancient cultures engaged in scapegoating rituals and 2) modern secular society cites scapegoating as a practice in families, as in the example above, and in workplaces and other groups.
If I’m right, then it follows that by formalizing the scapegoating process, the Day of Atonement ritual forced Israelites to acknowledge their sins, repent and atone for them, and thereby gain the Lord’s forgiveness.
That was powerfully effective for ancient people, and clearly it’s still in need today. We can’t release poor little goats into the wilderness (please don’t), but we can read Leviticus and think about how we might be either scapegoated by others or lapsing into scapegoating ourselves by projecting blame onto others—especially via modern politics. Is that why so many people completely flip out at the mere mention of the current U.S. President’s name? If he and over half the population who voted for him are scapegoats for unexamined sins, what are those sins?
What do you think? Please don’t flip out at the mere mention of my mere mention of the President’s name.
Walton, John H., et. al. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000.