Notes on Books I've Read: "Leviticus As Literature" by Mary Douglas

Maybe a new series, maybe not

Over the course of the year I have done some reading on Shabbos where whenever I find something interesting that I want to come back to, I put a book flag on the page where I found it, hoping that after shabbos I can come back to it and remember what I found so fascinating.

The thing is, I’ve read a bunch of books this past year and have not once went back to them to see what I flagged. So now that I’m on summer break, I figure, why not do that, and turn it into capital-C Content for the Substack I have seemingly neglected.

One of the books I read was “Leviticus as Literature” by Mary Douglas, in preparation for a project I wanted to do on Sefer Vayikra that I have procrastinated to next year. The book is quoted a lot by a certain type of rabbi, perhaps due to the influence of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who quoted it a whole lot. It was on my to-read list for years, and I finally got around to it this past year. I recall liking it, but we’ll see what I flagged.

This is not a review of this book or an attempt to comprehensively sum up its argument, these are my notes on stuff I found interesting enough to flag.

page 34

Very interesting critique of source criticism as reflecting the biases of Christians who are looking to find ways to make the history of the text reflect their own theological assumptions, with the guy they like most insisting on universalism. Most of what she’s getting at throughout the book is that we ought to take Vayikra on its own terms as it understands itself and through its own value system, not filtered through someone else’s. This is why Orthodox Jews like the book a lot despite it not accepting divine authorship and having readings of the peshat against halakha; she is reading the peshat not the way a Christian theologian would but arguing forcefully for the validity of a perspective that cares about the details of priestly laws, much of which form what is now Orthodox Judaism.

page 35-36

Very interesting observations here about the style that Vayikra is written in, where direct commands are rare and rules are presented as expectations, not imperatives. In a close-knit culture, like working class families in 60’s-70’s London, there was no need to give explanations for commands because the reasons for them were not the result of logic but the result of one’s position within the commonly held culture. This strikes me as an interesting insight into how the Torah operates.

page 38

Her argument is that Vayikra, contrary to how it is usually portrayed, doesn’t sound like its written by an aristocratic class, who generally uses more elaborate language befitting people who have to communicate with outsiders, then a working class, where its all about one’s identification with the community that constructs one’s identity.
I’m not sure if I buy this, because an aristocratic class of priests in the Ancient Near East has different priorities and worldviews than the upper middle class of England. For one thing, upward mobility wouldn’t really be a thing for priests. But I do think the overall point, that this is a communication style that takes obedience for granted as a function of identity, is on target.

Page 43

Interesting quote from an essay about what “love” means in the Ancient Near East context, essentially “willing consent”.

Her argument is that, because Vayikra thinks in analogies, rather than emotions, the way Vayikra writes about morality is by using analogies some from legal texts.

I’m not sure about this. I find it more likely that “love” is an emotion first that gets turned into a legal term later.

I do think she’s right that balance, order, craftsmanship, and design are the values of Vayrika and the Kohen in general. It does explain the concern with blemishes of the body on both offerings and kohanim, and it does have an effect on how Vayikra views morality.

page 48

Talking about the use of parallelism and chiastic structures, she argues that parallelism is not just an ancient Semitic thing but something that human beings inherently go for. This strikes me as true.

page 50

Yeah, human beings love to develop in-jokes, and they do it because its fun and because (this is me going off here) it develops a culture. Some of the best places I’ve worked were places where there was a lot of inside jokes because that was a place that had a developed culture. So she’s arguing a) Vayikra comes from a culture and b) it’s not necessarily an aristocratic scribal class that does this, just any sufficiently closed society.

After going on a bit about how different cultures made in-jokes out of literary structures, she comes to this, page 57

So her argument is going to be that the way that Vayikra is structured is using the mishkan itself as an analogy, because that’s the type of image available to an aniconic religion. Which is what she’s gonna spend the book doing. But the mishkan itself represents something.

In other words, the Mishkan is itself a representation of and perpetuation of Har Sinai, on which God revealed Godself to the Jewish people, and the barriers surrounding Har Sinai get put into the Mishkan. She quotes the Ramban and makes the claim that he’s drawing on ancient traditions. I think this is just obvious peshat.

Further, and now I’m going off on my own here, that the Mishkan is an attempt to perpetuate that revelation in the form of an institution, and that one of the animating forces of Jewish history is the tension between institutionalization of revelation and the force of revelation itself. The book of Vayikra is a guide to maintaining the flame of revelation at a safe level, so that it neither goes out nor burns everything down.

In other words, this where Douglas starts getting real interesting to me.

page 63

She brings Milgrom to support the Ramban, who points out that the phrase “Ohel Mo’ed” is based not an other cultures but on the revelation at Har Sinai. And there are more parallels. The cloud moves over the mishkan, The smoke on the mountain becomes the smoke of incense. This is good peshat.

Then its time to talk about sacrifices.

Hell yeah. Oh you think you’re so much more moral for sacrificing animals for your belly rather than to God? Get outta here.

page 72

Interesting comment here about the difference between a scientist’s view of a carcass and a butcher’s, and about how Vayikra (and Aristotle) would have seen the carcass from a butcher’s perspective rather than a scientist. Worth thinking about how much of what we call science is “highly artificial" and “specialized” that we still privilege as the purest form of knowledge.

Her explanation of the prohibition to eat the suet surrounding the animal is that it represents the cloud that surrounds Har Sinai, and the offered animal body is seen as microcosmic of both Har Sinai and the mishkan.

which leads to this trippy paragraph. (pg 79-80)

Cool that she sees ideas of Jewish mysticism being expressed in Vayikra. This fits in Rachel Elior’s idea that a lot of Jewish mysticism is displaced kohanim.

She continues (and I have, unusually, flagged multiple paragraphs on one page for this)

This does make a lot of sense, that the innermost chamber, the most secret and intimate part, is…erotic, and this relates to the themes we see in medieval kabbalah.

This would mean that kabbalah and mysticism accomplish things that the sacrificial service was supposed to accomplish. This is not what we usually might think. We tend to think of the sacrificial service as almost business like, organized by stern priests who know the prescribed procedures for everything. But there was an esctatic element to the temple service, as there usually is in animal sacrifice, and we should see the Kohanim as fulfilling shamanic roles, not just priestly roles.

I just think its cool she went to an actual butcher shop to figure this out.

Douglas has this idea, that I don’t know if its salvageable for frum, but is interesting nonetheless, that Vayikra forbids eating meat unless brought as a korban to a local shrine (not the centralized Beis HaMikdash, scandalously) and she derives a whole world of animal rights legislation from this.

Page 92,

Page 95

In other words, if the Torah prohibits castrating animals, the only recourse you have as a farmer to thin your herds is to bring them as korbanot.

Devarim, in its program of centralization, undercuts this by saying you can redeem their monetary value instead, Douglas does not like Devarim very much.
There might be a way to transpose this to frum by seeing a difference between bamot before the Beit HaMikdash and after, and the Netziv and Meshech Chochmah make similar moves.

Then she’s got this whole thing on Oracles. Generally, sacrificial cults are accompanied by oracles, who interpret things about the sacrifice. Weirdly, not in Vayikra. Huh. Weird.

page 110

This is a good point about the Urim V’Tumim though.

But there’s some cool stuff about oracles.

Oracles aren’t rigged, and in fact a lot of effort is made to making sure they’re not, but what oracles do, if I’m understanding her correctly, is narrow down the possible causes into things that can be corrected by human beings in the community. It’s a little bit similar to how Judaism understands history, misfortune, or even the weather. What can we do about this that will improve the community?
We do ourselves a disservice by imagining that all pre-modern forms of knowledge didn’t and don’t have their own methods and rationality to them, and one of the things I like about this book is her attempt to understand Vayikra not as an embarassing bunch of arcane laws that have been done away with, but as a system that has its own logic and worldview to it.

page 117

This is kind of cool: Because the hunt only works if there’s harmony in the village, it became a time to address grievances.

I didn’t flag anything else about oracles, but there is stuff in there that can be integrated with Rav Tzadok, who sees Moshe as representing a sort of oracular law that the prophet provides.

Then we get to her stuff about kashrut, probably her most quoted stuff.

Page 146

Douglas understands Tumah as a lack of preparation for holiness, which puts a person who encounters holiness in danger. And holiness is a function of the boundaries placed around something.
This seems like an important yesod.

I don’t have any flags on the rest of this section, but this yesod seems important for what I did flag next.

We skip to page 199

As mentioned Douglas has this idea that the text of Vayikra is constructed analogically to the Mishkan, and that the boundaries between each section are important. Those boundaries are the story of Nadav and Avihu and the story of the blasphemer. Both of them are breaches. The breaching of boundaries and of the divine order is what Vayikra sees as the root of sin. Interestingly, at least to me, the barriers are themselves stories of breaches, as if the only thing that can maintain the boundaries are narratives that warn of consequences.

. Anyway, page 200

I flagged this because part of my planned Vayikra project was a piece about the role of fire in Vayikra, and she’s attuned to the fact that fire definitely matters in Vayikra and in Tanach in general, as an identifier of God and God’s power. Hopefully one day I write this piece.

But she ends up compaying the Nadav and Avihu story to the Golden Calf story. Page 202

There’s some really good parshanut going on here. The parallel between the people drinking the gold dust water and the prohibition of drinking is particularly impressive work.

Basing myself a little bit on Douglas’s continuation, but maybe in my own words and my own conceptualization, we can say something like this, that the Golden Calf is what creates the Kohanim as a class by making clear the need for a way to continue revelation in some institutional form for the people. But Nadav and Avihu rebel against that institutionalization and what they do is breach the boundaries the Kohanim are meant to maintain. The Torah is using narratives to erect boundaries.

Skipping ahead to 245, where Douglas is talking about the Holy of Holies, and the “cover” that is on top of the Aron, where she connects it to Bereishis.

I do think her argument would be stronger with a philological argument, but I do also think she is onto something here in relating sin, atonement, clothing, nakedness, together with her whole argument about boundaries and the relationship with holiness and impurity.
If holiness is about boundaries, it means that there is a level of intimacy that is inappropriate. There are those you can appear naked in front of, and those you cannot. Vayikra is about the what the appropriate levels of “dress” are for appearing in front of God. What boundaries must be erected for the encounter to be safe for both participants? What happens to those who strip off any sense of those boundaries?

Its a good book and I recommend it.
I hope that this will lead to some lively discussion in the comments and if people like this, I can do it for more of the books that I have read and flagged.