Book of Leviticus

Leviticus, the third of the five books of Moses, is the Torah's book of worship and holiness, spoken to Israel from the tent at Sinai: it lays out the offerings and the priesthood, the laws of clean and unclean, the one day each year when the high priest enters the inner sanctuary, and the summons "Ye shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy," which reaches its plainest form in "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"; the Church receives it as Moses' work and, following the Epistle to the Hebrews, reads its priesthood and sacrifices as a shadow whose substance is Christ.

For Inquirers

A reader who sets out to read the Bible from the first page often finds the going slow at Leviticus. The story that had been moving so fast, with a family becoming a people and a people walking out of slavery, comes to rest at the foot of a mountain. God has come to live among Israel in a tent, and instead of a journey the book gives instructions: which animals may be offered at the altar and how, what the priests wear and how they are set apart, which foods are fit to eat, what a family does after a baby is born or when someone falls ill with a skin disease. The name means roughly the book of the Levites, the tribe the priests came from,[^names] and the Orthodox Study Bible calls it "our first-ever book of worship," written to teach Israel how to come near to God rightly.[^osb-intro]

Under all the strangeness there is one idea, said over and over in different ways: "Ye shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy."[^lev19] The rules about blood and fire, washing and waiting are lessons in what it means to live next door to God, who may come near Him, and what that costs. The same chapter that says this also holds a sentence far more familiar than the rest of the book, "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,"[^lev19] which Jesus later names as the second of the two greatest commandments.[^neighbor-nt] And once a year, on a day the book calls the day of atonement, the high priest alone went behind the curtain into the innermost room of the tent, carrying the blood of an animal and a cloud of incense, to ask forgiveness for the whole people.[^lev16]

The Church has not treated Leviticus as a rulebook to be kept whole, and she has not thrown it away either.^ow-lev The letter to the Hebrews treats the priests, the blood, the curtain, and the yearly day of atonement as a picture drawn ahead of time of the one Priest who offered Himself once and does not need to offer again,[^heb-short] and the Church still hears the book read aloud in her services, on the feast when Mary carries the infant Jesus into the Temple and on the first day of her year.[^meeting-short] How exactly the pieces fit, whether those sacrifices were God's own command or a gift He stooped to receive, what the clean and unclean rules were for, and how to hear the harsher laws, are questions that Christians and Jews have argued over for a very long time, and the argument goes on among people who love the book.

Overview

• Leviticus is the third book of the Old Testament and of the five books of Moses, the Torah or Pentateuch. OrthodoxWiki gives its Greek title as meaning "Relating to the Levites," and says the English name comes through the Latin from the Septuagint's form; the Hebrew title is the book's first word, "and He called."^names
• The Church's tradition ascribes it, with the whole Pentateuch, to Moses. The Orthodox Study Bible writes that "Both Israel and the Church traditionally ascribe authorship to Moses" and puts the giving of the book at Mount Sinai, and the book's own closing lines say so ("in mount Sina").[^osb-intro][^sinai]
• It stands third in every list of the Old Testament cited here: Cyril of Jerusalem's, Athanasius's, the Synod of Laodicea's, Jerome's account of the Hebrew order, the list in the Apostolic Constitutions, and the Council of Carthage's.[^canon-lists]
• Its shape, in the Orthodox Study Bible's outline, runs from the laws governing sacrifices (chapters 1-7) through the ordination of Aaron and his sons (8-10), the laws of uncleanness (11-15), and the day of atonement (16). Another Orthodox summary continues with holiness laws (17-26) and rules for vows (27).[^osb-intro][^mileant-pent]
• Its central themes are how to approach God in worship (the Orthodox Study Bible's "Major Theme" is "How to worship God"); holiness, with the call to "be holy" repeated in chapters 11, 19, and 20; blood and atonement ("the life of flesh is its blood"); the line between clean and unclean; and a neighbor-love that extends in the same chapter to the stranger.[^osb-intro][^lev17-11][^lev19][^lev11]
• Leviticus is set entirely at Sinai. OrthodoxWiki notes that "There is no geographical movement of the people of Israel" in it, and that it reads at once as "a manual for the worship of God in Israel and a theology of the Old Covenant ritual."^ow-lev
• Its place in the New Testament is large for so unfamiliar a book. OrthodoxWiki counts quotations "on 15 occasions"; the Epistle to the Hebrews builds its account of Christ's priesthood on the day of atonement chapter (Leviticus 16) and the Levitical priesthood; and the Lord's summary of the law takes its second commandment from Leviticus 19.[^ow-lev][^heb-short][^osb-heb][^neighbor-nt]

Summary

Leviticus opens where Exodus closed, with the tent finished and the Lord speaking from it: "And the Lord called Moses again and spoke to him out of the tabernacle of witness" (Leviticus 1.1). The first seven chapters answer the question of how a person comes near, and the answer is that he brings a gift: an "unblemished male of the herd" for a whole-burnt-offering, on whose head the worshiper lays his hand "to make atonement for him"; fine flour with oil, frankincense, and salt; the peace-offering; the sin-offering and trespass-offering, with a pair of turtle-doves allowed to the man who "cannot afford a sheep" (Leviticus 1.3; Leviticus 1.4; Leviticus 2.13; Leviticus 5.7). Then Moses anoints Aaron and keeps him and his sons at the door of the tent for seven days, and on the eighth "fire came forth from the Lord, and devoured the offerings on the altar," so that "all the people saw, and were amazed, and fell upon their faces" (Leviticus 8.12; Leviticus 8.35; Leviticus 9.24). The joy lasts a few lines. Aaron's sons Nadab and Abiud take their censers and offer "strange fire before the Lord, which the Lord did not command them," and the same fire consumes them (Leviticus 10.1; Leviticus 10.2), after which the priests are told to keep from wine whenever they enter the tent, "to distinguish between sacred and profane, and between clean and unclean" (Leviticus 10.9; Leviticus 10.10). Chapters 11 to 15 give the details of that distinction: the beasts "parting the hoof ... and chewing the cud" that may be eaten, the mother who after a birth "shall touch nothing holy" until "the days of her purification be fulfilled," the skin disease to be shown to the priest and the healed leper who is sprinkled seven times, and the bodily discharges, all so that Israel "shall not die for their uncleanness, in polluting my tabernacle that is among them" (Leviticus 11.3; Leviticus 12.4; Leviticus 13.2; Leviticus 14.7; Leviticus 15.31). The hinge of the whole book is chapter 16. On the tenth day of the seventh month Aaron, after bathing and dressing in linen, goes "within the veil" with a censer of coals and "fine compound incense," so that "the smoke of the incense shall cover the mercy-seat"; he sprinkles the blood of a calf and of a goat, casts lots upon two goats, "one lot for the Lord, and the other for the scape-goat," lays his hands on the living goat, confesses over it "all the iniquities of the children of Israel," and sends it into the wilderness to "bear their unrighteousnesses," while the people "humble" their souls (Leviticus 16.2; Leviticus 16.8; Leviticus 16.12; Leviticus 16.13; Leviticus 16.21; Leviticus 16.22; Leviticus 16.29). Chapter 17 turns from the tent to the table and the field with the rule against eating blood, "For the life of flesh is its blood," and from there the book becomes a charter for a whole way of life (Leviticus 17.11). Israel is not to live "according to the devices of Egypt" or of Chanaan (Leviticus 18.3), and chapter 19 opens, "Ye shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy," before it goes on to leaving the edges of the field for the poor, honest balances, impartial judgment, and the commands "thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" and, of the foreign resident, "thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Leviticus 19.2; Leviticus 19.10; Leviticus 19.18; Leviticus 19.34). Chapters 20 to 22 attach penalties to the gravest offenses and set stricter rules for the priests, chapter 23 gives the calendar of the Sabbath, the Passover, the first-fruits, the trumpets, the day of atonement, and the feast of tabernacles, and chapter 24 returns to the tent with the lamp and the twelve loaves before telling of a man who "named THE NAME and cursed" and was stoned outside the camp (Leviticus 23.27; Leviticus 24.5; Leviticus 24.11). In chapter 25 the land itself keeps a sabbath, and every fiftieth year the trumpet sounds on the day of atonement to proclaim "a release upon the land to all that inhabit it; it shall be given a year of release, a jubilee for you" (Leviticus 25.9; Leviticus 25.10). Chapter 26 sets blessings beside warnings, among the blessings "I will walk among you, and be your God, and ye shall be my people" and among the warnings "I will scatter you among the nations," and even there it ends with a promise to "remember the covenant of Jacob" (Leviticus 26.12; Leviticus 26.33; Leviticus 26.42). The brief last chapter, on vows and tithes, closes the book with its colophon: "These are the commandments which the Lord commanded Moses for the sons of Israel in mount Sina" (Leviticus 27.34).[^sum]

Author, Source, and Intention

Where Genesis does not name its writer,^ow-gen Leviticus puts the Lord's voice on nearly every page, and almost the whole book consists of what He says. That changes how the question of authorship arrives. The reader is not left to infer a writer from silence. The book hands over a voice, a mountain, and a tent, and leaves the reader to ask what it means for a book made of divine speech to be the work of a man. The general debate over Mosaic authorship and the sources behind the Pentateuch is set out at length in Book of Genesis and is not repeated here; what follows takes up what is particular to Leviticus.

Who wrote it

The Orthodox Study Bible states the Church's tradition without qualification: "Both Israel and the Church traditionally ascribe authorship to Moses." It adds the observation that Moses "uses the phrase 'and the Lord said to Moses' as many as thirty times, usually to begin a chapter."[^osb-intro] OrthodoxWiki gives a larger number, saying that the fact that God gives these laws to Moses "appears 56 times in Leviticus."^ow-lev A count in the English of Brenton's Septuagint finds thirty-five sentences of the form "the Lord spoke to Moses" or "the Lord said to Moses," thirty-seven if "called Moses" and similar variants are included; the three figures differ because the answer depends on what is counted and in which text, and all three agree on what matters, that the book is built from one repeated formula.[^sinai]

The formula is not the only thing that ties the book to Sinai. Four verses spread across it fix the speech to a place: the sacrifices were commanded "in the day in which he commanded the children of Israel to offer their gifts before the Lord in the wilderness of Sina," the law of the sabbath year was spoken "in the mount Sina," the blessings and warnings close with "the law which the Lord gave between himself and the children of Israel, in the mount Sina, by the hand of Moses," and the last verse of the book repeats the point.[^sinai] OrthodoxWiki reads these verses as settling the question of date and authorship in the text itself: "The authorship and date issues are resolved in the verse" at the end of the book.^ow-lev A reader who does not share that confidence can still see what the book claims for itself, namely that it is a record of commands given at one place, through one mediator, at the start of Israel's stay at the mountain.

The New Testament treats the legislation of the book as Moses' own. When the Lord heals a leper and sends him to the priest, He tells him to "offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them," which sends the man to the procedure of Leviticus 14, and Luke's account of the Presentation speaks of "the days of their purification according to the law of Moses," the law of Leviticus 12.[^nt-moses] In the council at Jerusalem James says that "Moses from generations of old has in every city those who preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath," and Chrysostom, commenting on that verse, says that James enjoined the requirements of the decree from the Law "that he may not seem to make it of no authority."[^nt-moses][^chrys-acts33] None of these verses says in so many words that Moses wrote down the book called Leviticus. They establish that the Lord, the evangelist reporting the visit of Mary and Joseph to the Temple, and James at the council all spoke of this legislation as the law of Moses, and the Fathers inherited that way of speaking.

The Fathers cited here speak in the same idiom. The Apostolic Constitutions put the matter in a comparison, saying that "Moses did so concerning priests in Leviticus," as Samuel had made rules for a king, and the same work's list of the Old Testament books names "the five books of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy."[^ac-moses] Tertullian, arguing against Marcion, refers to "that in Leviticus, which concerns the sacerdotal office" as one of the Creator's laws, and Basil, answering a question about marriage, calls the author of Leviticus 18 "the lawgiver."[^tert-lev-law][^basil-160] The Fathers cited here speak of Leviticus as the Creator's law given through Moses.

OrthodoxWiki, in its Leviticus article, reports that "Christian and Jewish tradition holds that God dictated the Book of Leviticus to Moses as He did the other Books of the Law," and its note quotes a Jewish commentator that "the first four books God dictated to Moses, letter by letter."^ow-lev Fr. Stephen De Young, who also holds to the Mosaic tradition, describes it in other terms: "Moses did write," he says, and "there are written documents from Moses that form the basis of what we have," which were afterwards copied, translated into the later form of Hebrew in which the oldest manuscripts survive, and, in the case of the end of Deuteronomy, supplemented.[^dy-torah] The Orthodox Church in America adds a principle that governs both: "the Church Tradition considers the identity of the human authors as incidental to the correct interpretation and proper significance of the books of the Bible for the believing community," and OrthodoxWiki says the same of the canon, that even a book proved "not to be from its traditionally ascribed author" would not be removed.^oca-auth The range runs from dictation to a Mosaic core handed down by a copying tradition, and none of these accounts makes the book's standing as Scripture depend on deciding between them.

What lies behind it

The book's own account of its origin is brief and consistent: the speech comes from "the tabernacle of witness," and the tent is already standing. The Orthodox Study Bible notes that "The opening statement (1:1) presupposes the Tabernacle has been erected, as described in Exodus 40," and OrthodoxWiki that the whole is "presented in a historical format," with "no geographical movement of the people of Israel," who stay at the foot of the mountain from the first chapter to the last.^osb-intro Within that frame there are stretches of plain narrative, the consecration of the priests and the death of Nadab and Abiud in chapters 8 to 10 and the story of the blasphemer in chapter 24, and OrthodoxWiki says the book "chronicles several historical accounts relating to the laws."[^ow-lev][^lev10][^lev24] The accounts add dates of different kinds. OrthodoxWiki holds that the revelation likely came in the first month of the second year after the Exodus, with Numbers beginning in the second month. The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction separates two moments, saying that the book was given "during the sojourn at Mt. Sinai" and that "The writing of this book took place five months after Israel left Mt. Sinai," which seems to describe Moses setting down at a later stage what was spoken at the mountain; neither source says how the writing was done.[^ow-lev][^osb-intro]

When Aaron is told not to drink wine or strong drink on entering the tent, the book names its own audience and use in the reason it gives: "to distinguish between sacred and profane, and between clean and unclean, and to teach the children of Israel all the statutes, which the Lord spoke to them by Moses" (Leviticus 10.9-Leviticus 10.11).[^lev10] Bishop Alexander (Mileant), in his booklet on the Pentateuch, draws the consequence that the priests "were responsible for teaching the Law to the people, conducting sacrificial worship in the tabernacle according to the directions given by God, and ordering the life of the community."[^mileant-pent] On this account the book was the working instruction of a priesthood, and De Young's remark in another context, that the people who copied the Torah down the generations "were mostly priests, because they were literate," fits the picture without settling any larger question.[^dy-torah]

Behind the laws of the book lies the older practice of sacrifice that Genesis already shows. The flood story already sorts the animals as "clean" and "unclean," and Noah's offering is taken "of all clean beasts, and of all clean birds" (Genesis 7.2; Genesis 8.20); De Young remarks in his introduction to Genesis that a reader of the flood story will ask where the "clean" and "unclean" animals come from, and that the answer "is going to come later." The remark suggests that Leviticus would be giving written form to categories already at work in the world of the patriarchs, though De Young does not draw that inference himself.[^dy-gen-intro] Some of the commands also carry their foils inside them. The Lord tells Israel not to live "according to the devices of Egypt" or "of the land of Chanaan," and says of the nations about to be dispossessed that "in all these things the nations are defiled, which I drive out before you."[^lev18] The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction takes this as the point of the book's difference, that it "points out the differences between God's laws for His people and those of the polytheistic, idolatrous, corrupt nations surrounding them," and Mileant goes further, writing that "No part of it has been adopted from any other nation" and that the jubilee legislation "is unique in the Near East."[^osb-intro][^mileant-pent] Those are claims about the ancient Near East, and neither writer cites a Hittite, Ugaritic, or Mesopotamian ritual text against which the claims could be tested.

Basil, asked whether a man may marry his dead wife's sister, answers from Leviticus 18. The letter he is refuting argues from the wording of verse 18, and Basil replies that the lawgiver forbade the marriage more broadly in verse 6, "None of you shall approach to any one that is near of kin to him," a prohibition that reaches the wife's sister through the unity of husband and wife, since "they are no more two but one flesh."[^basil-160] Basil treats Leviticus 18 here as binding for his church, though in the same letter he warns that what the law says it says to those under it, or the Church would be subject to circumcision, the sabbath, and abstinence from meats, a point taken up below.

Why it was written

In the Orthodox Study Bible's words, "This is our first-ever book of worship. It was especially written for priests to teach the Israelites how to rightly worship God."[^osb-intro] OrthodoxWiki, under the heading "Major Theme," offers two points to develop, "How to have access to God through appropriate worship" and "How to be spiritually acceptable to God through an obedient walk," and in its background section describes Leviticus as "a manual for the worship of God in Israel and a theology of the Old Covenant ritual."^ow-lev The book supplies its own account of what is at stake. Nadab and Abiud die because they brought fire "which the Lord did not command," and Moses explains the death by what the Lord said: "I will be sanctified among them that draw nigh to me, and I will be glorified in the whole congregation" (Leviticus 10.3).[^lev10] Worship in Leviticus is dangerous because the One worshiped is holy, and the book spends its length teaching how to approach Him without dying.

"Ye shall be holy," the Lord says at the head of chapter 19, "for I the Lord your God am holy," and the sentence recurs in chapters 11, 19, and 20, each time followed by commands, which suggests that the laws having nothing to do with the tent serve the same end.[^lev19][^lev11][^lev18] The Orthodox Church in America reads the whole law in this light: "God's people should share in His holiness. This was the purpose of the entire Law of Moses in its commandments of morality and worship."[^oca-holiness] Peter, writing to the churches, takes the same sentence over: "just as he who called you is holy, you yourselves also be holy in all of your behavior, because it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy'" (1 Peter 1.15-1 Peter 1.16).[^1pet]

The earthly tent was built, the letter to the Hebrews says, as "a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, even as Moses was warned by God when he was about to make the tabernacle, for he said, 'See, you shall make everything according to the pattern that was shown to you on the mountain,'" and the law itself had "a shadow of the good to come, not the very image of the things."[^heb-short] The Orthodox Study Bible, in its note on the sacrifices, says that "The offerings were types prefiguring a greater reality to be fulfilled in the coming Incarnation of Christ," and Chrysostom, preaching on the same letter, puts the principle in a sentence: "The types therefore contain the figure only, not the power; just as in images, the image has the figure of the man, not the power."[^osb-16][^chrys-heb17] Augustine supplies the reason why a God who needs nothing should command such things: "A sacrifice, therefore, is the visible sacrament or sacred sign of an invisible sacrifice," and the ancient church's animal offerings "signified the things which we do for the purpose of drawing near to God."[^aug-cog-10]

F. F. Bruce, in his chapter on the idea of a canon within the canon, notes that the suggestion that on the road to Emmaus the risen Lord took up the Levitical offerings one by one and showed how each foreshadowed His own sacrifice has been made more in popular exposition than in serious exegesis, and that it seems far-fetched to some, a group he appears to count himself among; he adds that for the Christians to whom it is self-evident, and for whom the priestly legislation belongs to their inner canon, it must be allowed its place within the Church's canon (pp. 271-72, paraphrased).[^bruce-priestly] The Orthodox witnesses cited above stand with those for whom the typology is plain.

Manuscripts and the text

No autograph of Leviticus is described. F. F. Bruce lists among the surviving Jewish copies of the Septuagint two fragmentary scrolls of Leviticus from Cave 4 at Qumran, 4QLXXLev a and 4QLXXLev b, alongside a Qumran scroll of Numbers and fragments of Deuteronomy found elsewhere (pp. 43-44, paraphrased).[^bruce-lxx-lev] The Hebrew text that Judaism follows is the Masoretic Text, which OrthodoxWiki says was "primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the seventh and tenth centuries AD," whose oldest surviving fragments date only from about the ninth century and whose oldest copy, the Aleppo Codex of the tenth century, is in OrthodoxWiki's words "missing the Torah," though the same article says the consonants of the Masoretic text differ little from some older Qumran texts.^masoretic That Hebrew tradition has left a small mark on the book: OrthodoxWiki, in its account of the Masoretes' counting of the text, records that Leviticus 8:23 in the Hebrew numbering, where the blood is put on the right ear, thumb, and toe of Aaron, is "the middle verse in the Pentateuch."^masoretic The Samaritan Pentateuch is a third witness; Bruce describes it as a popular Palestinian form of the Hebrew Pentateuch edited to match Samaritan tradition (p. 41, paraphrased), and no list of its readings in Leviticus is given.[^bruce-sam]

The Church's text is the Septuagint, which, OrthodoxWiki says, began as a translation of the Torah alone, so that Leviticus belongs to the oldest layer of the Greek; De Young notes that the translators rendered torah as nomos.[^lxx-ow][^dy-torah] Origen's Hexapla set the Hebrew, a Greek transliteration of it, and four Greek versions side by side so that each could be checked against the others, and OrthodoxWiki says its aim was to reveal the true text of the Hebrew Scriptures.^hexapla For anyone comparing the English texts, some differences between them are visible without an apparatus. Brenton's Septuagint reads at Leviticus 18:21 "thou shalt not give of thy seed to serve a ruler," but at 20:2-3 the offender is one who "shall give of his seed to Moloch"; the Orthodox Study Bible, which follows Rahlfs's Greek, has "a ruler" in both places.[^lev-variants] OrthodoxWiki speaks of the prohibition in chapter 20 as one "against sacrificing children to Molech."^ow-lev No critical apparatus for Leviticus is cited here, and the divergence between Brenton's English and the Orthodox Study Bible's at chapter 20 is left unexplained.

Brenton's English has "scape-goat" for the second goat of the day of atonement (Leviticus 16.8), and Origen cites the goat under two names. In Contra Celsum he says that the goat "which in the book of Leviticus is sent away (into the wilderness), and which in the Hebrew language is named Azazel" was none other than the devil, and in On First Principles he lists among the opposing powers the one "who in the book of Leviticus is called Apopompæus, i.e., Averter."[^origen-azazel] The Greek, then, gave this figure a name of its own, and the Fathers' discussion of him, taken up below, begins in the vocabulary of the translation.

Luke says that "the days of their purification according to the law of Moses were fulfilled" (Luke 2.22), and Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, annotating the Menaion's Old Testament reading for the feast of the Meeting of the Lord, notes that Luke has "their" where one might expect "her" and that "according to the Western text" the pronoun is "his," and the reading, which is drawn from Leviticus 12 and differs from the Septuagint, "is made to refer to the child."[^lash-12] In the Gospel of Mark, too, the Lord's teaching on food ends in a clause that the World English Bible prints inside His question ("making all foods clean?"), while the Jewish Annotated New Testament, which uses the New Revised Standard Version, treats it as the evangelist's comment, "thus he declared all foods clean," and calls that comment "an historically inaccurate gloss."[^mk7-text] The English versions punctuate and weigh the clause differently; no variant reading of the Greek is at issue in the accounts cited.

Translations

The book's names are themselves a record of its translations. The Hebrew title is its first word, which Jerome renders Vaiecra and which Bruce, reporting Origen's list of the Hebrew titles, gives as Wayyiqra, "and he called."[^names] The Greek title says what the book is about, the service of the Levites, and the English name, OrthodoxWiki says, "comes from the Latin Vulgate version of the Greek OT (Septuagint, LXX) Leuticon meaning 'matters of the Levites.'"[^names] The same article writes the Greek title as "Λευιτικός"; these writers do not say how the Septuagint manuscripts themselves spell the title, and Levitikon is given as an alias.

How the Greek rendered the word torah matters for every law in the book. Jonathan Klawans, in the Jewish Annotated New Testament's essay on the law, observes that the Jewish translators of the Septuagint rendered it "with nearly perfect consistency" by nomos, "law," although the New Jewish Publication Society version renders torah in a phrase like "the Law of Moses" as "the Teaching of Moses" because the Pentateuch contains narrative as well as legislation.[^jant-law] De Young makes the same point in his introduction to the Torah and places Leviticus on the legislative side of it: the part with "the commandments and laws proper," he says, begins near the end of Exodus, "And then it's Leviticus, parts of the book of Numbers and parts of the book of Deuteronomy."[^dy-torah]

For the Latin West, Damasus commissioned Jerome to revise the Latin Bible, and OrthodoxWiki reports that Jerome's translation from the Hebrew, begun about 390, "was not accepted by many, including Augustine, who felt the Septuagint was slighted."^vulgate English translators have had to choose between the Greek and the Hebrew. Two English texts of the Greek Old Testament are used here. One is Lancelot Brenton's of 1844, made, OrthodoxWiki says, "according to the Vatican text, translated into English: with the principal various readings of the Alexandrine copy"; the other is the Orthodox Study Bible, a new translation based on Rahlfs's Greek "with reference to the Brenton translation," which OrthodoxWiki says uses the New King James text where the Greek matches the Hebrew.^lxx-ow Wherever the book's English wording matters in this entry, the wording is Brenton's or the Orthodox Study Bible's, and a Bible based on the Hebrew will differ in details.^masoretic

Controversy and Contestation

Leviticus has been argued over from several sides: by Christians who wanted to be rid of it, by Fathers asking how much of it was history and how much figure, and by modern readers who ask when and by whom it was composed and what Christians owe to a book whose rules they do not keep. Beneath all of these sits the question of what a book of sacrifices and purity laws is doing in the Church's Bible at all.

Marcion's mockery and the Church's reply

One of the sharpest recorded attacks on the book came from inside the Christian world, and Tertullian reports it as a list of what the heretic holds in derision in the Old Testament as a whole. The Creator's Old Testament, Tertullian allows, can be charged with foolishness, weakness, and meanness, and he supplies the charges himself: "What is more foolish and more weak than God's requirement of bloody sacrifices and of savoury holocausts? What is weaker than the cleansing of vessels and of beds? What more dishonourable than the discoloration of the reddening skin?"[^tert-v5] The last item points to the inspection of a bright spot on the skin in Leviticus 13, and the first two stand for the offerings of the opening chapters and the washings of the middle of the book. The charge has force because it is accurate to the text: Leviticus does require blood and fire, and it does send a man to a priest to have his skin examined. Tertullian's reply accepts the premise and turns it, answering that God chose the foolish things of the world to confound its wisdom, and that Marcion's god lacks this discipline because he does not follow the Creator in setting opposites against one another.[^tert-v5] Marcion's own words are not preserved in the writings cited, so his side of the dispute is known only as Tertullian reports it.

In the books around this one Tertullian shows the Gospels agreeing with Leviticus at the points where Marcion saw a break. The woman with the flow of blood who touched the Lord's garment was read by the heretic as a deliberate breach of the law that forbids contact with such a woman (Leviticus 15.19), and Tertullian asks the objector what he is, "that you should detect an hostility to the law in that act, which the Lord Himself shows us to have been done as a reward of faith."[^tert-iv20] When the Lord answered a man who wished first to bury his father, Tertullian hears behind the answer the law of Leviticus that forbids a priest to be defiled by the dead even among his own kin (Leviticus 21.1-Leviticus 21.2), and he takes the Lord to be confirming that law and applying it to one called to preach.[^tert-iv23] These readings will not persuade every modern reader, but they show the shape of the Church's answer: the Gospels and the law come from one God.

A version of the same charge was made by the Manichaeans. Chrysostom, preaching on the Lord's teaching about what defiles, pauses over the saying that every plant the Father has not planted will be rooted up, which the Manichaeans claimed was aimed at the law, and he answers from the surrounding text: "For if He was speaking of the law, how does He further back defend it, and fight for it, saying, Why do ye transgress the commandments of God for your tradition?"[^chrys-mt51-mani] Chrysostom speaks of the law as a whole and does not name Leviticus, but his question is a fair one to put to anyone who says the Lord was repealing Leviticus by implication, and it gives the shape of his answer: the Lord's quarrel in that chapter is with a human tradition laid over the law, and His treatment of the law itself is another matter, taken up below.

Moses and the Priestly source

OrthodoxWiki's article on Leviticus holds two accounts in one text and does not reconcile them. It says that Christian and Jewish tradition holds that God dictated the book to Moses, it dates the Exodus to about 1445 BC and the finishing of the tabernacle a year later, and a few lines further it says that "Modern scholarship sees the Book of Leviticus as a product of the Priestly source and therefore dates it to the fifth century BC." The same article divides the book as the scholarship does, calling chapters 1 to 16 and the last chapter the Priestly Code and chapters 17 to 26 the Holiness Code.^ow-lev A reference work written for Orthodox readers that carries both views side by side, without comment, shows the vocabulary of source criticism appearing in Orthodox writing. An Orthodox booklet on the Church published on FatherAlexander.ORG speaks of "the severity of strictures set forth in the Holiness Code" when it discusses sexual ethics. The Jewish Annotated New Testament, in a note on 1 Timothy, uses the same label for Leviticus 18 and 19.[^holiness-label]

The critical position is reported here as an Orthodox teacher describes it, not from a critic's own text. Fr. Stephen De Young says the sources of the Torah were sorted into J, E, D, and P, and of the last he says: "P stands for priest. And they said: Oh there's a lot of priesty stuff in here ... That must be something the priests came up with later."[^dy-torah] The critics' own arguments for a fifth-century date are not reconstructed here, and since De Young is a critic of the method, his summary should be read as an opponent's account. De Young concedes one point that bears on the question, that "the people who were copying the Torah down through the generations were mostly priests, because they were literate."[^dy-torah] A Torah copied by priests might be expected to show a priestly hand, and where the critics and the tradition part is over whether that hand belongs to Moses' own priestly circle or to a later one.

De Young's reply takes up the method and leaves the single observations alone. No one, he says, "has ever found a copy or a fragment of any of these hypothetical documents separately," and the subdivision of the sources ended with single verses assigned in pieces to different hands; the whole scheme, he argues, rested on a nineteenth-century assumption that religion and literature grow from the simple to the complex, and once the Torah is treated that way, "you've also completely relativized it. What authority does it have left?"[^dy-torah] The Orthodox Church in America answers the authority question differently, by denying that a book's standing depends on its author, and OrthodoxWiki's article on the canon says the canon would keep even a book proved not to come from its traditional author.^oca-auth The two replies fit together, and the second spares the first from having to win every argument about dates. The wider debate over the sources of the Pentateuch, including Bishop Nathanael's argument from the prophets' knowledge of the Torah, is set out in the Genesis entry's section on Moses and the sources; Leviticus enters that debate because the label "Priestly" was attached, on De Young's account, to exactly the ritual material this book contains.

Who is the second goat?

The Fathers who take up the two goats of the day of atonement divide over whether the second goat is Christ or the adversary. The Epistle of Barnabas takes both goats as pictures of the Lord. They were to be of a like appearance, he says, so that when the people see Him coming again they "may be amazed by the likeness of the goat," and the goat that was cursed, spat upon, pierced, and wreathed in scarlet wool is "the type of Jesus who was to suffer."[^barn7]

Tertullian reads the pair in nearly the same way, asking of the two goats, "do they not also figure the two natures of Christ?" The goat driven out "amid cursing, and spitting, and pulling, and piercing" bears the marks of the Lord's passion, and the goat offered for sins and eaten by the priests points to His second appearance, when the priests of the spiritual temple, the Church, will enjoy the grace of the Lord.[^tert-iii7] On both readings the goat sent into the wilderness is Christ rejected and despised, and the one on the altar is Christ in glory.

Origen reads the second goat differently and says so plainly. In Contra Celsum he argues that the goat "which in the book of Leviticus is sent away (into the wilderness), and which in the Hebrew language is named Azazel, was none other than" the devil, sent to the desert and treated as an expiatory sacrifice because the lot fell on it, since all who belong to the worse part are deserted by God.[^origen-ccvi43] OrthodoxBridge notes that the Orthodox Church does not regard Origen as a Church Father and cites him cautiously, and no ruling between his reading and that of Barnabas and Tertullian is reported.[^origen-ccvi43] The Orthodox Study Bible's note on the day does not choose between them. It says the ceremony prefigures the once-for-all self-sacrifice of Christ, "our great High Priest ... who takes upon Himself all the sins of all humanity," and it describes the laying of Israel's transgressions on the living goat without naming whom the goat represents.[^osb-16]

The text of Leviticus is brief enough to bear more than one of these readings. The lot falls, one "for the Lord" and the other "for the scape-goat"; the first is offered; the second he "shall present alive before the Lord, to make atonement upon him," Aaron lays his hands on it and confesses over it "all the iniquities of the children of Israel," and it carries them "into a desert land" (Leviticus 16.8; Leviticus 16.10; Leviticus 16.21; Leviticus 16.22).[^lev16] A goat that makes atonement while alive and bears sins away can be read as the Lord who bears them or as the place to which they are banished, and the Fathers divided accordingly.

Commanded, conceded, or fulfilled?

Whether God willed the sacrifices of Leviticus at all is a question the Church's writers answer in more than one voice. The book speaks directly. Each sacrifice is introduced as a gift the worshiper brings to the Lord, the priest "shall make atonement" and the sin "shall be forgiven him," and the blood is the gift God Himself assigns: "I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls" (Leviticus 17.11).[^lev17-11][^lev4] The Orthodox Study Bible reads the system as a gift in this sense, saying that it gave the Hebrews "a means to be reconciled with God and to restore harmony amongst themselves, relationships disrupted by sin."[^osb-16] It then adds a qualification that bears on the doctrine of atonement: the animal "was more than simply a substitute for the worshiper," since "There was also identification between the animal sacrificed and the one on whose behalf it was offered."[^osb-16] That sentence makes substitution one element of the picture among others, and the larger topic belongs with the entries on Propitiation and Expiation and Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

Against this stands the line of the prophets, which the Apostolic Constitutions press hard. Citing Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Constitutions say that before His coming the Lord "refused the sacrifices of the people, while they frequently offered them, when they sinned against Him, and thought He was to be appeased by sacrifices, but not by repentance."[^ac-vi22] Brenton's Jeremiah carries the sentence on which this reading leans: "For I spoke not to your fathers, and commanded them not in the day wherein I brought them up out of the land of Egypt, concerning whole-burnt-offerings and sacrifice" (Jeremiah 7.22).[^jer7] The Constitutions do not conclude that the whole law was a mistake. They teach that Christ "has confirmed and completed the law, but has taken away the additional precepts, although not all of them, yet at least the more grievous ones," so that part of the Mosaic legislation stands, on this account, as an addition to the law that Christ confirmed.[^ac-vi22] This is the sharpest form of the "conceded" view found in these writings, and it is the view of an ancient church order; no council is cited for it.

Augustine takes the question on different ground. God needs nothing from anyone, he says, so the animal offerings of the ancient church were commanded for the sake of what they signified: "A sacrifice, therefore, is the visible sacrament or sacred sign of an invisible sacrifice." The psalmist who says that God does not desire burnt offering and yet that a contrite heart is His sacrifice is not contradicting the law; he is naming what the offering was a sign of.[^aug-cog-10]

Irenaeus supplies the continuity from the other side. Writing on the Church's oblation, he says that "the class of oblations in general has not been set aside; for there were both oblations there [among the Jews], and there are oblations here [among the Christians]," and that what changed was the kind of offerer, slave or free.[^irenaeus-418] The Orthodox Study Bible's note on the sacrificial system gathers the threads. The offerings, it says, "were types prefiguring a greater reality," and the prophets' complaint fell on offerings detached from the life they were meant to express: "Offering sacrifices never exempted the Hebrews from the duty to live prayerfully and morally."[^osb-16]

The letter to the Hebrews says flatly that "it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins" (Hebrews 10.4), and Chrysostom, preaching on the ninth chapter, explains that "the sacrifices did not put away the defilement from the soul, but still were concerned with the body."[^heb-short][^chrys-heb15] In the seventeenth homily he describes what the yearly repetition meant: "there was an arraignment of sins, and not a release from sins."[^chrys-heb17] A reader who has just met "it shall be forgiven him" in Leviticus 4 is entitled to ask how the two texts stand together, and the writers cited do not set them side by side. What they supply are the pieces from which the Church's answer is built: the offerings were real, they were given by God, they concerned the body and the community and kept sin in view, and they pointed to the offering that does what they could not. The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes in its notes on Hebrews 9 that "In Jewish tradition, sacrifice has many functions, including worship, commemoration, inauguration, purification, as well as expiation," and a reader may take from this that to say sacrifices cannot take away sin is to speak of one function of a larger practice.[^jant-heb9]

What the Church kept of clean and unclean

The laws of clean and unclean raised a pressing practical question for the first Christians and have raised it ever since: which of these laws does the Church still keep? The Jewish side is put best by Amy-Jill Levine in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, who argues that the purity laws were not the burden Christian preaching has often made them: "Ritual purity along with Sabbath observance, avoiding certain foods such as pork, making sure meat was slaughtered in an appropriate manner, and tithing certain agricultural products also helped Jews resist assimilation, served as a sign of Jewish identity, helped support the poor, and otherwise reminded them that they were Israel, the covenant community."[^jant-levine] Her essay adds that Elizabeth and Mary were not marginalized after childbirth, and that impurity is part of the natural order and carries no mark of evil.

The Fathers did not leave the food laws as simple rules. Barnabas says of the list of forbidden animals in Leviticus 11 that "Moses spoke with a spiritual reference": the swine, the eagle, the hare, and the weasel stand for kinds of men one should not resemble, and the Jews erred in taking the commands as if they concerned meat alone.[^barn10] David Freidenreich observes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament that such Christian writing was a polemic against literal observance, and he adds that Jewish writers had already done something similar: the Letter of Aristeas and Philo both explain that the dietary rules "offer lessons in moral virtue," so that the allegorical reading of these laws has Jewish precedent.[^jant-food]

Origen carries the argument further in the fourth book of On First Principles, where he holds that the law contains "impossibilities" meant to push the reader beyond the letter, among them "an animal called the goat-stag, which cannot possibly exist, but which, as being in the number of clean beasts, Moses commands to be eaten." Those who hold that Scripture has no more meaning than the letter, he says, think no inquiry into such creatures is needed.[^origen-iv17] Clement of Alexandria turns the same rules into a moral grammar in which the creature that "parts the hoof and chews the cud" signifies the righteous, who ruminate on the word.[^clem-paed]

Whether the Lord Himself set the food laws aside is a question on which the writers cited answer in two ways. Chrysostom, preaching on the parallel in Matthew, thinks the Lord approached the subject with care: "He does not yet venture distinctly to set Himself with boldness against the meats." The depth of the scruple, Chrysostom adds, appears in Peter, who said even after the resurrection, "Not so, Lord, for I have never eaten anything common or unclean" (Acts 10.14).[^chrys-mt51] The same homily observes that the law itself had treated the defilement of food as lasting only while it remained in the body, a point he finds in Leviticus 11:24-25.[^chrys-mt51]

The Jewish Annotated New Testament takes another view of what the Lord said. Klawans writes that "Scholars are nearly unanimous in rejecting this passage's authenticity," meaning the clause in Mark 7:19 that makes all foods clean, and Freidenreich that "Jesus and his disciples adhered to these food restrictions" and that in the passage "Jesus does not reject the dietary laws of the Torah but rather the more stringent Pharisaic requirement that food be consumed in a ritually pure fashion."[^jant-law][^jant-food] The two accounts differ about what the Lord said. Klawans cites Peter's vision at Joppa as a sign that the question was still alive after the resurrection, and Freidenreich takes up the apostolic decree.[^jant-law][^jant-food]

Acts tells the matter in two scenes. Told to "kill and eat" from a sheet that holds "all kinds of four-footed animals of the earth, wild animals, reptiles, and birds of the sky," he answers that he has "never eaten anything that is common or unclean," and the voice replies, "What God has cleansed, you must not call unclean" (Acts 10.12-Acts 10.15). Peter draws the conclusion at once about people: "God has shown me that I shouldn't call any man unholy or unclean" (Acts 10.28).[^acts10] At the council in Jerusalem the Gentiles are asked to "abstain from the pollution of idols, from sexual immorality, from what is strangled, and from blood" (Acts 15.20). Freidenreich notes that "Early Christian authorities uniformly interpret the decree literally," and he cites Genesis 9, Leviticus 17, and Ezekiel 33 as the passages in which blood is forbidden to all people or to the whole covenant community.[^jant-food] Klawans describes the seven "Noachide Laws" that the rabbis derived from Genesis 9 as the minimal obligations binding on Gentiles, and relates the idea to Paul's remark that some Gentiles "do instinctively what the law requires"; Fagenblat lists several of them, among them renouncing idolatry and prohibiting murder and theft, and sets Acts 15:29 beside them with a "cf."[^jant-law][^jant-neighbor] The entry on The Council of Jerusalem puts the connection more firmly than these notes do, and a reader should treat the stronger claim as that entry's own inference.

Basil states a working principle in a sentence written for another purpose. Answering a man who had argued from Leviticus that a widower may marry his late wife's sister, he begins: "whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law; otherwise we shall be subject to circumcision, the sabbath, abstinence from meats."[^basil-160] He does not dismiss Leviticus 18 on that ground. He rests the prohibition first on his church's custom, which he says "has the force of law," and then on an argument from the law's own meaning, so that in this letter he keeps the marital prohibition while remarking that the ritual commands bind only those under the law. The Apostolic Constitutions make a similar cut more bluntly. Christ, they say, "did not take away the law of nature, but confirmed it," and, as for the rest, "He did not therefore take away the law from us, but the bonds."[^ac-vi23]

The Apostolic Constitutions reject the observances of women's bodily impurity outright. They tell the woman who thinks herself void of the Holy Spirit in her days of separation that "neither lawful mixture, nor child-bearing, nor the menstrual purgation, nor nocturnal pollution, can defile the nature of a man, or separate the Holy Spirit from him," and that she should go on praying and receiving the Eucharist, since "such observations are the vain inventions of foolish men."[^ac-vi27]

Gregory the Great, writing to Augustine of Canterbury about the English, takes a gentler and more qualified road. A woman after childbirth need not be kept from the church, since "it is the pleasure of the flesh, not the pain, that is in fault," and the thirty-three and sixty-six days of the old law are "understood mystically." A woman in her monthly sickness may enter the church and even receive, though if "out of great reverence, she does not presume to receive, she is to be commended." The principle behind both rulings, he writes, is that "as in the old Testament outward acts were attended to, so in the New Testament it is not so much what is done outwardly as what is thought inwardly that is regarded with close attention."[^gregory-64] He still asks a husband to wash before coming into church and reads the law's waiting until evening spiritually, as a figure of the cooling of desire. The Constitutions treat Leviticus 15 as a dead letter and Gregory treats it as a letter with a spirit. The entry on Churching ties the Church's rite for a new mother to Leviticus 12 and the Presentation, and OrthodoxWiki's account of the feast of the Meeting of the Lord says of the Virgin that she "had no need of purification," having given birth to "the Source of purity and sanctity without defilement," and yet "humbly fulfilled the requirements of the Law."^meeting-ow

Hebrews, the priesthood, and the charge of supersession

The Epistle to the Hebrews is the New Testament's great reading of Leviticus, and for many Jewish readers and some Christian ones it is also the New Testament's hardest. Pamela Eisenbaum, introducing it in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, writes that "As both perfect sacrifice and heavenly priest who intercedes for humans, Jesus supersedes the Jewish sacrificial system, rendering it obsolete." In her guide to reading she adds that "In recent years, scholars have made efforts to address the problem of anti-Judaism in Hebrews."[^jant-heb]

The Orthodox sources do not dispute the vocabulary. The Orthodox Study Bible says that Christ's once-for-all offering "supersedes the Mosaic sacrificial system," and OrthodoxWiki that the New Testament "clearly abrogates Old Testament ceremonial law, the levitical priesthood and the sanctuary."^osb-16 Whether the supersession of a ritual system implies contempt for the people who kept it is the question that follows, and the Fathers' own words keep the two apart at some points and strain the distinction at others.

The tone is gentler in places. Commenting on the verse that says the high priest offered "for the errors of the people," Chrysostom notes that the apostle "said not sins; but errors, that they might not be high-minded," a remark aimed at the humility of the hearers.[^chrys-heb15] The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction to Hebrews presents the Levitical priests as men who "carry out God's instructions and assist the people in their worship," and places their limit where the letter does: "they cannot ultimately reconcile people to God."[^osb-heb] Klawans, writing as a Jewish scholar, supplies what both sides might say together: "Neither Christians nor rabbinic Jews have come to abolish the Law. And traditionally, Christians and Jews have fulfilled the Torah/Pentateuch by finding its deeper meanings somewhere else, be it the New Testament for Christians, or the Oral Torah for Jews."[^jant-law]

In other places the Fathers' language about the old offerings turned into language about the people who made them. Irenaeus, arguing that the Church alone offers the pure oblation, adds that "the Jews do not offer thus: for their hands are full of blood; for they have not received the Word."[^irenaeus-418] Chrysostom's eight homilies against those Christians who joined Jewish festivals, among them the feast of Trumpets, the feast of Tabernacles, and the fasts, the first two of which Leviticus 23 sets in the calendar,[^lev23] are a vehement example. OrthodoxWiki reports both his words and Robert Wilken's argument that the label of anti-Semitism is anachronistic for sermons in the genre of invective.[^chrys-judaizers] Levine's essay in the Jewish Annotated New Testament is aimed at exactly this inheritance. Among the ten errors it lists are the view that "purity laws were both burdensome and unjust" and the contrast of Jewish "law" with Christian "grace."[^jant-levine] OrthodoxWiki records Chrysostom's words and the debate over them without settling it.

Jewish tradition did not stand still while the Church read Leviticus 16 as a picture of Christ. The Jewish Annotated New Testament observes, in its note on the high priest in Hebrews 5, that "after the temple was destroyed, some rabbis believed prayer, repentance, and alms-giving achieve atonement," and that the Mishnah holds that the daily prayers substitute for the temple sacrifice; a note elsewhere says that the Jewish tradition concerning Yom Kippur "stresses both human and divine forgiveness."[^jant-heb5] A Christian reading of the day of atonement that wishes to be fair to its first audience should know that the day has its own continuing life. Jerome, arguing in defense of fasting, cites the day as proof that God commands it: "in Leviticus He commands the whole people in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, to fast until the evening."[^jerome-jov]

The Holiness Code and the present

"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Leviticus 19.18) is quoted by the Lord, by Paul, and by James, who calls it "the royal law" (Matthew 22.39; Romans 13.9; James 2.8). The Orthodox writers cited follow the New Testament in treating the Lord's use as the key. The Apostolic Constitutions have Him say in the Gospel what He had said in the law, "renewing the same precept," and the Orthodox Church in America cites Leviticus 19:18 beside the Gospels when it calls love of neighbor the greatest commandment after the love of God.[^ac-vi23][^oca-neighbor]

Michael Fagenblat, in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, answers the usual Christian picture of Leviticus 19:18 on two points. The commandment was addressed within the covenant community, he says, which is no defect, since "charging Jews with failing to interpret 'the neighbor' in a universal sense amounts to charging them with failing to misinterpret the language of their own scriptures." The same chapter, however, extends the same love to the resident foreigner, so that verse 34 "equates the love prescribed to one's fellow Israelite with love for the stranger."[^jant-neighbor] He adds that Jews took the commandment as a principle for regulating the other laws, while some early Christians took the pairing of love of God and love of neighbor to mean that Jesus had set the other commandments aside.[^jant-neighbor] Brenton's text bears out his reading of verse 34, and Orthodox writers still reach for it: an essay in Public Orthodoxy on immigration asks how the faithful, who were themselves newcomers, can hesitate to express solidarity with migrant families, citing Leviticus 19:34.[^public-orth]

The sexual statutes of Leviticus 18 and 20 are invoked in present-day debate, and Orthodox writers approach them from two sides. The Orthodox Church in America says that the judgment that those who "do such things deserve to die" was "taken literally in the law of Moses," while holding that the New Testament is "even more strict in their demands regarding sexual purity," and OrthodoxWiki and a FatherAlexander.ORG booklet cite Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 for the Church's teaching on same-sex relations.[^oca-sexuality][^ow-homosexuality] Klawans notes in the Jewish Annotated New Testament that "Biblical prohibitions of homosexuality (Lev 18.22; 20.13) have also resurfaced in public discourse as passages taken literally and seriously by many conservative Christians, much to the chagrin of Christian liberals."[^jant-law] Within Orthodoxy, an essay in Public Orthodoxy cautions that "One look at Leviticus would dispel" any reading of the Tradition as "reducible to literal interpretation of injunctions from the Bible."[^public-orth-morality] Basil and Gregory, in the uses described above, applied the book with discrimination, keeping some laws by an argument from their meaning and treating others as binding only on those under the law or as figures to be read spiritually, and no conciliar rule that draws the line between the two more precisely is cited here.

The economic laws of chapter 25 are read with a similar mixture of seriousness and distance. Clement of Alexandria cites the sabbath year, the gleaning laws, and the jubilee, when land returns to its owner, as proof that the law is "humane" and "the teacher of righteousness," because it set "bounds to the desires of those who covet possession."[^clem-strom] Jerome reads the same chapters as "not to the present, but to the future": the seventh day is the true Sabbath on which the redeemed are freed, and at the jubilee "every possession returns to its owner."[^jerome-jov] The year of release has a second life in the Gospels, where the Lord reads from Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth, "to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord," and says, "Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4.19; Luke 4.21), and the notes of the Jewish Annotated New Testament point from the Isaiah passage to "the Jubilee tradition of Lev 25."[^luke4] The Church begins her year, according to the Anastasis liturgical texts, with a reading from Leviticus 26, the chapter of blessings that follows the jubilee.[^sept1]

None of this removes the harder parts of chapter 25 from the text. The same chapter forbids lending to a brother at interest (Leviticus 25.36), and it also permits Israelites to buy "men-servants and maid-servants" from the surrounding nations as "permanent possessions for ever" (Leviticus 25.44-Leviticus 25.46).[^lev25] As far as the Orthodox Study Bible's text of the chapter shows, it carries no note on these verses, and the entry gives none of its own.

Torah observance and the Church

The apostolic answer to whether any Christian, Jewish by birth or Gentile, is bound to keep these laws came at Jerusalem, where the Gentile believers were not required to keep the whole Law and four requirements were laid on them (Acts 15.19-Acts 15.21; Acts 15.28-Acts 15.29), a settlement that Chrysostom takes James to have framed from the Law so as not to seem to make it of no authority.[^chrys-acts33] Basil answers in his own way, that the law speaks to those under it. A further voice warns against Christians keeping Jewish observances anyway: Chrysostom's homilies were aimed at those who "will join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts," and the Apostolic Constitutions rebuke those who "keep to the Jewish customs and observances concerning the natural emission and nocturnal pollutions."[^chrys-judaizers][^ac-vi27]

Klawans states the question from the side of Jewish scholarship. Paul, he writes, "did not reject 'the Law,' when we understand that term to mean 'the Pentateuch,'" but at least some "works of the law," especially "certain rituals concerning food and the body," troubled him when practiced by Gentiles.[^jant-law]

Methods of Criticism

The methods modern scholars bring to Leviticus are the ones they bring to every book, and Leviticus tests them in its own way: it offers almost no narrative to date, a great deal of ritual to explain, and a voice that claims to speak from a tent at the foot of one mountain. The methods are reported here mostly at second hand, through Orthodox and Jewish summaries.

Textual criticism asks what the original wording was in a book whose autograph is lost and whose copies disagree. For Leviticus the evidence described is the same triple stream seen in Genesis, a Hebrew tradition fixed by the Masoretes, the Greek of the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, with Greek Leviticus scrolls among the finds at Qumran.[^masoretic][^bruce-lxx-lev][^bruce-sam] The effects these sources describe are small: a difference between "a ruler" and "Moloch" in the English of two chapters, a Greek name for the second goat of the day of atonement, and a pronoun in Luke's account of the Presentation that the manuscripts do not agree on.[^lev-variants][^origen-azazel][^lash-12] Orthodox reception is straightforward on the principle: the Church reads the Septuagint, and OrthodoxWiki says that "the Orthodox Church continues to regard the LXX as its only canonical text of the Old Testament."^lxx-ow Origen's Hexapla was an ancient effort of the same kind, laying the versions side by side, and no Orthodox policy on critical editions is stated in the works cited beyond the fact that the Orthodox Study Bible's Old Testament follows Rahlfs's edition.^hexapla

Source criticism asks what earlier materials or strands lie behind the book, and for the Pentateuch it has meant, in De Young's account, the documentary hypothesis with its sources J, E, D, and P.[^dy-torah] Its claim about Leviticus is the one OrthodoxWiki reports: that the book is a product of a "Priestly source" and should be dated to the fifth century BC. The same article divides the book into a Priestly Code, the first sixteen chapters and the last, and a Holiness Code in chapters 17 to 26.^ow-lev Orthodox reception runs through three registers. OrthodoxWiki reports the claim without adopting it and continues to say that the Church connects the Law with Moses; De Young presses the method's incoherence and its dependence on a developmental assumption; and the Orthodox Church in America denies that the question of authorship decides a book's authority.[^ow-ot][^dy-torah][^oca-auth] The vocabulary has also moved into ordinary Orthodox usage, in the label "Holiness Code" for Leviticus 17 to 26 that appears in an Orthodox booklet and in OrthodoxWiki's own article.[^holiness-label]

Form criticism asks about the small units, the sayings, laws, and stories that circulated and took shape before they were gathered into books. No form-critical claims about Leviticus are reported here, and none is attributed to the method. The book's own patterns are the kind of material the method works with: the repeated opening "The Lord spoke to Moses," the case-law style of "If any man of you shall bring gifts to the Lord" (Leviticus 1.2), and the two places where a narrative is followed by a standing ruling, the death of Nadab and Abiud, which is followed by the instruction to priests about wine and the distinction between sacred and profane (Leviticus 10.1-Leviticus 10.11), and the blasphemer's case, which ends with a rule that there shall be "one judgment for the stranger and the native" (Leviticus 24.10-Leviticus 24.23).[^lev10][^lev24] Those are observations from the text, offered so that a reader knows what the method would look at.

Redaction criticism, in its general sense, takes the book as it stands and asks what editors did with their material. The Priestly Code and Holiness Code division is reported without more, and who the editor was, or how many there were, is left open. The book's place in its final context is described differently. OrthodoxWiki says that "In its current form, each successive book of the Pentateuch picks up and continues the story of the previous book to form a continuous story," and that "Exodus describes the building of the tabernacle at Sinai while in Leviticus Moses is given rules while at Sinai for offering sacrifice and worship at that tabernacle."^pent De Young adds that the Torah has "always circulated as a unit" of five books, "often contained on one big scroll, sometimes on five individual scrolls."[^dy-torah] On these accounts the book's place is fixed by its function as the instruction that follows the building of the tent, whatever its prehistory.

Historical-critical and social-scientific approaches set the book in its world and ask what its institutions meant to the people who practiced them. The Jewish Annotated New Testament supplies the closest approach to such work among these writers. Marc Brettler reads the New Testament's picture of Jesus' death as an atoning offering as evoking "the Priestly writings (Lev 16.1-19; Num 19.1-10)," and Levine describes purity and food rules as signs of Jewish identity and as a means of keeping the covenant community together, and Freidenreich observes that the table was a place where early Christian leaders worked out the status of Gentiles.[^jant-brettler][^jant-levine][^jant-food] Comparative study of Israel's neighbors would be the other branch of the method, and here the evidence cited is thin. The Orthodox Study Bible and Bishop Alexander (Mileant) assert the book's difference from surrounding cultures, and no Near Eastern ritual text is cited to test the claim.[^osb-intro][^mileant-pent]

John Behr voices an Orthodox reservation about the approach, observing that the study of Scripture has, until recently, been "dominated by the presuppositions of a historical-critical method," concerned with what a text "meant rather than means." The Orthodox Church in America allows that scholars "can help men to understand its divine contents and meaning," though it holds that by themselves they cannot produce the proper interpretation. Both place the weight on what the method cannot supply by itself.[^behr-12][^oca-interp]

Narrative, literary, and canonical approaches read the book in the form the Church received it. A canonical reading of Leviticus is already present in the New Testament, where Hebrews takes the tent, the priesthood, and the day of atonement from this book and reads them with Christ.[^heb-short] The Orthodox Study Bible's introduction to Hebrews sets out the canonical reading as an outline, with Christ's priesthood "superior to Aaron's" and His worship "superior to Moses'."[^osb-heb] Brevard Childs's canonical approach, as Bruce describes it for Exodus, asks what a passage means within the Pentateuch and then within the Church's canon, and Bruce's discussion of a canon within the canon takes up the priestly legislation directly, conceding that finding the gospel there strikes some as far-fetched and concluding that those for whom it belongs to their inner canon must be allowed it.[^bruce-childs][^bruce-priestly]

The patristic and Orthodox alternative begins from the four senses that OrthodoxWiki ascribes to the Fathers, the literal or historical, the allegorical or typological, the tropological or moral, and the anagogical or mystical, with the note that "that a text had an allegorical or typological meaning did not negate the historical sense of the text."^ow-typology The patristic uses of Leviticus cited in this entry can be sorted by these four senses. The literal sense is the one Basil uses to forbid a marriage from Leviticus 18, and the one Origen's opponents defend in the food laws.[^basil-160][^origen-iv17] The typological sense is the one Hebrews builds and the Fathers extend, in Barnabas's two goats and in Chrysostom's "types" that "contain the figure only, not the power."[^barn7][^chrys-heb17] The moral sense is the one Gregory the Theologian intends when he asks his hearers, instead of giving God a part of themselves as the priest's portion was a part of the offering, to give themselves whole: "let us be reasonable holocausts."[^nazianzen-40] Augustine gives the same sense when he says that "man himself, consecrated in the name of God, and vowed to God, is a sacrifice."[^aug-cog-10-6] The anagogical sense is the one Methodius reaches when he reads the feast of tabernacles of Leviticus 23 as pointing to the day of resurrection, saying that "the things said in Leviticus are symbols and figures" of the feast that will be kept in "the seventh month, the great resurrection-day."[^methodius]

Clement of Rome and the Apostolic Constitutions reason from the Old Testament priesthood to the Church's own order, though neither passage cited names Leviticus. Clement writes to Corinth that the Lord appointed offerings and services for fixed times and fixed persons, and that "his own peculiar services are assigned to the high priest, and their own proper place is prescribed to the priests, and their own special ministrations devolve on the Levites."[^clem-rome] The Apostolic Constitutions press the comparison further. As no one outside the tribe of Levi might offer or approach the altar, they say, "so also do you do nothing without the bishop"; the same work likens the widows and orphans to the altar of burnt offering and the virgins to the altar of incense.[^ac-ii27] The entry on Priesthood takes up how the Old Testament priesthood and the Church's differ, and these early texts witness to how seriously the Church took the categories of holy time, holy place, and holy order.

Leviticus also sounds in the Church's services, where the book is read aloud at more than one point. At the feast of the Meeting of the Lord, OrthodoxWiki reports, the Vespers readings include a composite of Exodus 12:15 to 13:16, Leviticus 12, and Numbers 8, the Divine Liturgy has Hebrews 7:7-17 on the change of the priesthood, and the Gospel is Luke 2:22-40, in which the Virgin "humbly fulfilled the requirements of the Law."^meeting-ow On the first of September, the beginning of the Church's year, the Anastasis lectionary gives a reading made of selected verses of Leviticus 26, the blessings and warnings that close the Holiness Code.[^sept1] At Pentecost the Orthodox Study Bible reads Leviticus 23 as already pointing forward: the firstfruits of the grain harvest are fulfilled "by the first harvest on the Day of Pentecost, which consisted of the Jews who believed and were baptized," and the two leavened loaves of Leviticus 23:17 are "prophetic of the ingathering of both Jews and Gentiles."[^osb-23] The synaxarion for the forefeast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple recalls the Holy of Holies, where "No one could enter there except the High Priest, who entered alone once a year (on the Day of Atonement)," and says that the Virgin "herself was to become the Holy of Holies."[^entry-theotokos] OrthodoxWiki says the curtain across the Royal Doors represents the curtain that divided the Holy of Holies, and finds its significance in Hebrews 9 and the Day of Atonement.^curtain

First-fruits, which Leviticus 23 commands,[^lev23] appear in early Christian writing as well, though the passages cited do not name Leviticus. The Didache tells its readers to give "Every first-fruit ... of the products of wine-press and threshing-floor, of oxen and of sheep" to the prophets, "for they are your high priests," and the Apostolic Constitutions include a form of thanksgiving "for the first-fruits which are offered to You."[^didache][^ac-viii] Irenaeus says that "We are bound, therefore, to offer to God the first-fruits of His creation," and counts the Church's oblation as the continuation of the old.[^irenaeus-418] Incense stands in Leviticus 16:12-13 on the coals of the censer within the veil, and a canon in the Apostolic Constitutions allows nothing at the altar but new grain and grapes in season, "oil for the holy lamp, and incense in the time of the divine oblation," while the entry on Incense sets the practice in its wider biblical frame.[^lev16][^ac-viii-canon] John of Damascus counts the washings of Leviticus among the baptisms that came before Christian baptism ("The third baptism was that of the Law"), and in his chapter on worship toward the east he notes that "the tent of Moses had its veil and mercy seat towards the East," citing Leviticus 16:14.[^jd-baptism][^jd-east] OrthodoxWiki traces the aspergillum, the instrument for sprinkling holy water, to the cedar, scarlet, and hyssop of Leviticus 14, quoting Adam Clarke's commentary; no patristic source is cited.^aspergillum Not every such practice has a stated origin, and only the links that a writer states are claimed here.

The questions the book raises about the law's fulfillment, about typology, and about priesthood are taken up in the entries on Fulfillment of The Law, Typology in Scripture, and Priesthood, and its place beside the other books of Moses is set out in The Torah and Book of Genesis. The book that opens with the Lord calling Moses from the tent and closes still at Sinai is read by the Church as a book about drawing near to God, about the priest who goes in once and the people who wait outside, and about the Priest who has gone in for them.

Sources

[^names]: OrthodoxWiki, "Leviticus"; Jerome, Prologus Galeatus; Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, 73–74, on Origen's list of the Hebrew titles.

[^osb-intro]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Leviticus.

[^sinai]: Leviticus 7.38; Leviticus 25.1; Leviticus 26.46; Leviticus 27.34 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Leviticus; OrthodoxWiki, "Leviticus." The counts of the formula are a tally of the English text of Leviticus 1–27 in Brenton.

[^canon-lists]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.35; Athanasius, Festal Letter 39; Synod of Laodicea, canon 60; Jerome, Prologus Galeatus; Apostolic Constitutions 8.85; Council of Carthage (397), canon on the canonical Scriptures.

[^mileant-pent]: Bishop Alexander (Mileant), The Bible, part 2: The Pentateuch, section on Leviticus.

[^lev23]: Leviticus 23.10; Leviticus 23.24; Leviticus 23.34 (Brenton).

[^oca-auth]: Orthodox Church in America, "Authorship."

[^oca-interp]: Orthodox Church in America, "Interpretation."

[^dy-torah]: Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Introduction to the Torah" and "Introduction to Genesis" (podcast lectures).

[^dy-gen-intro]: Stephen De Young, The Whole Counsel of God, "Introduction to Genesis"; Genesis 7.2; Genesis 8.20 (Brenton).

[^sum]: Leviticus 1.1–Leviticus 27.34 (Brenton), in particular Leviticus 1.1; Leviticus 1.3–Leviticus 1.4; Leviticus 2.13; Leviticus 5.7; Leviticus 8.12; Leviticus 8.35; Leviticus 9.24; Leviticus 10.1–Leviticus 10.2; Leviticus 10.9–Leviticus 10.10; Leviticus 11.3; Leviticus 12.4; Leviticus 13.2; Leviticus 14.7; Leviticus 15.31; Leviticus 16.2; Leviticus 16.8; Leviticus 16.12–Leviticus 16.13; Leviticus 16.21–Leviticus 16.22; Leviticus 16.29; Leviticus 17.11; Leviticus 18.3; Leviticus 19.2; Leviticus 19.10; Leviticus 19.18; Leviticus 19.34; Leviticus 19.36; Leviticus 23.27; Leviticus 24.5; Leviticus 24.11; Leviticus 25.9–Leviticus 25.10; Leviticus 26.12; Leviticus 26.33; Leviticus 26.42; Leviticus 27.34.

[^lev10]: Leviticus 10.1–Leviticus 10.11 (Brenton).

[^lev11]: Leviticus 11.44–Leviticus 11.45 (Brenton).

[^lev16]: Leviticus 16.2–Leviticus 16.34 (Brenton).

[^lev17-11]: Leviticus 17.10–Leviticus 17.11 (Brenton).

[^lev19]: Leviticus 19.2; Leviticus 19.18; Leviticus 19.34 (Brenton).

[^lev18]: Leviticus 18.3; Leviticus 18.24; Leviticus 20.7; Leviticus 20.26 (Brenton).

[^lev-variants]: Leviticus 18.21; Leviticus 20.2–Leviticus 20.3 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Leviticus 18:21 and 20:2–3.

[^lev24]: Leviticus 24.5–Leviticus 24.23 (Brenton).

[^lev25]: Leviticus 25.36; Leviticus 25.44–Leviticus 25.46 (Brenton); The Orthodox Study Bible, Leviticus 25.

[^lev4]: Leviticus 4.20; Leviticus 4.26; Leviticus 4.31 (Brenton).

[^neighbor-nt]: Matthew 22.36–Matthew 22.40; Luke 10.27 (WEB).

[^heb-short]: Hebrews 8.5; Hebrews 9.7; Hebrews 9.12; Hebrews 10.1; Hebrews 10.4 (WEB).

[^nt-moses]: Matthew 8.4; Luke 2.22; Acts 15.21 (WEB); Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Law" (Jonathan Klawans), 517.

[^1pet]: 1 Peter 1.15–1 Peter 1.16 (WEB).

[^acts10]: Acts 10.12–Acts 10.15; Acts 10.28; Acts 15.20 (WEB).

[^mk7-text]: Mark 7.19 (WEB); Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Law" (Klawans), 515, and "Food and Table Fellowship" (David M. Freidenreich), 522.

[^chrys-acts33]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Hom. 33.

[^ac-moses]: Apostolic Constitutions 2.34; 8.85.

[^tert-lev-law]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.23.

[^basil-160]: Basil the Great, Letter 160, §§3–4.

[^oca-holiness]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holiness."

[^osb-16]: The Orthodox Study Bible, notes at Leviticus 16.

[^chrys-heb17]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews, Hom. 17.

[^chrys-heb15]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews, Hom. 15.

[^aug-cog-10]: Augustine, City of God 10.5.

[^aug-cog-10-6]: Augustine, City of God 10.6.

[^bruce-priestly]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), chapter on a canon within the canon, approximately 271–72.

[^bruce-lxx-lev]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 43–44.

[^bruce-sam]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 41.

[^bruce-childs]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 330.

[^origen-azazel]: Origen, Against Celsus 6.43 (the Hebrew name Azazel); On First Principles 3.2.1 (the Greek name Apopompaios, in Rufinus's Latin).

[^origen-ccvi43]: Origen, Against Celsus 6.43; OrthodoxBridge, "Defending Incense."

[^lash-12]: Ephrem Lash, Anastasis, "Readings February to April," note on the reading for February 2.

[^jant-law]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Law" (Klawans), 515–18.

[^tert-v5]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 5.5.

[^tert-iv20]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.20.

[^tert-iv23]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.23; Leviticus 21.1–Leviticus 21.2 (Brenton).

[^chrys-mt51-mani]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 51.

[^holiness-label]: FatherAlexander.ORG, "The Orthodox Church"; Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), note on 1 Timothy 1.9–11; OrthodoxWiki, "Leviticus."

[^barn7]: Epistle of Barnabas 7.

[^tert-iii7]: Tertullian, Against Marcion 3.7.

[^ac-vi22]: Apostolic Constitutions 6.22.

[^jer7]: Jeremiah 7.22 (Brenton).

[^irenaeus-418]: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.18.1, 4.18.2, 4.18.4.

[^jant-heb9]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), notes on Hebrews 9, 416–17.

[^jant-levine]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Amy-Jill Levine, "Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism," 501–2.

[^barn10]: Epistle of Barnabas 10.

[^jant-food]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "Food and Table Fellowship" (Freidenreich), 521–22.

[^origen-iv17]: Origen, On First Principles 4 (Rufinus's Latin), §17.

[^clem-paed]: Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus 3, section "Amusements and Associates."

[^chrys-mt51]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 51.

[^jant-neighbor]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian Ethics" (Michael Fagenblat), 540–42.

[^ac-vi23]: Apostolic Constitutions 6.23.

[^ac-vi27]: Apostolic Constitutions 6.27.

[^gregory-64]: Gregory the Great, Epistles 11.64 (replies to Augustine of Canterbury).

[^meeting-short]: OrthodoxWiki, "Meeting of the Lord"; Ephrem Lash, Anastasis, "Readings September to November," September 1.

[^jant-heb]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), introduction to Hebrews (Pamela Eisenbaum), 406–7.

[^osb-heb]: The Orthodox Study Bible, introduction to Hebrews.

[^chrys-judaizers]: OrthodoxWiki, "John Chrysostom," section on the homilies against the Judaizers.

[^jant-heb5]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), notes on Hebrews 5.1–6, 411, and on Ephesians 1.7.

[^jerome-jov]: Jerome, Against Jovinianus 2.17; 2.25.

[^oca-neighbor]: Orthodox Church in America, "Love of Neighbor."

[^public-orth]: Public Orthodoxy, "“For You Were Aliens in the Land of Egypt”: Why Orthodox Christians Cannot Remain Silent on United States Immigration Policies" (2018).

[^oca-sexuality]: Orthodox Church in America, "Sexuality."

[^ow-homosexuality]: OrthodoxWiki, "Homosexuality"; FatherAlexander.ORG, "The Orthodox Church."

[^public-orth-morality]: Public Orthodoxy, "“Orthodox Morality” on Sex or an Ethics of Sex? Part One: Dogmas v. Canons and Beliefs v. Ethics" (2019).

[^clem-strom]: Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 2.18.

[^luke4]: Luke 4.18–Luke 4.21 (WEB); Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), notes on Luke 4.18–19, 106.

[^sept1]: Ephrem Lash, Anastasis, "Readings September to November," September 1, reading 72.

[^behr-12]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006), 12–13.

[^jant-brettler]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, eds, The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press), "The New Testament between the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and Rabbinic Literature" (Marc Zvi Brettler), 504.

[^nazianzen-40]: Gregory the Theologian, Oration 40, §40.

[^methodius]: Methodius of Olympus, Symposium (Banquet of the Ten Virgins), Discourse 9, ch. 1.

[^clem-rome]: Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians 40.

[^ac-ii27]: Apostolic Constitutions 2.26–27.

[^osb-23]: The Orthodox Study Bible, notes at Leviticus 23.

[^entry-theotokos]: Synaxarion for the Forefeast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple (November 20).

[^didache]: Didache 13.

[^ac-viii]: Apostolic Constitutions 8.30; 8.40.

[^ac-viii-canon]: Apostolic Constitutions 8.47, canons 3–4; Leviticus 24.2 (Brenton).

[^jd-baptism]: John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.9.

[^jd-east]: John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith 4.12.