Leviticus

To properly understand Isaiah, one must understand the use of the Hebrew words translated into English as “near” and “far.”   In turn, to understand that, one must understand the importance of their use in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy.  In Leviticus, the idea of coming “near” to God is extremely important.  The Hebrew root for the word “near” is used four times in the first two verses of the book.  Reading in the translated English, you do not see “near” at all, and so you would have no clue!    The idea of “nearness” is a way that the book can be divided into two halves structurally.  (For several technical reasons, evidence of that structure is more complex than just the raw use of the roots, but the hint is there in the opening lines of Leviticus.)  It is an extreme over condensation, but one could succinctly say that Leviticus 1 – 10 contains prescriptions for how priests were to come “near” to a Holy God, and Leviticus 11 – 27 (the remainder of the book) discusses how the rest of the community can come “near” to God.  Christians believe that all of these ceremonial rules for the sacrificial prescriptions were looking forward to Christ.

If you click away from this page with the idea that “near” is important in Leviticus, that is good enough for now, but detailed-oriented people and Biblical scholars will want a little bit more information.  For more information on the idea of “near” in Leviticus, click on this link which is an excerpt from a forthcoming book.