Canter Bridge

The final chapters of the book of Leviticus mark out Israel’s two fundamental choices and their consequences in terms of YHWH’s blessing and curse. Here all the particulars of priestly legislation fall away, throwing into view only the largest features of the moral landscape. A choice for YHWH means a decision to live by his judgments and statutes. Its recompense is his blessing in the most earthy, satisfying form. The contrary choice represents a decision to live like all the other nations, outside of the exclusive, covenantal relationship that YHWH desires. It will bring down, we are told, wasting curse upon the people.

Yet the resolute dualism of Israel’s options and her destiny are not precisely symmetrical. YHWH’s tenacious fidelity excludes any mechanistic and level playing field, any notion that naked human will were the only variable in play.

For the land shall be deserted by them, and enjoy its sabbath years by lying desolate without them, while they shall make amends for their iniquity, because they dared to spurn my ordinances, and they abhorred my statutes. Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not spurn them, or abhor them so as to destroy them utterly and break my covenant with them; for I am the LORD their God.

Throughout the Levitical corpus, the expession ‘for I am YHWH their (your) God’ serves as a kind of exclamation point. YHWH’s nature, his character, indeed his personality stand in as the bedrock of all that is declared about his world and the human drama that takes place upon it.

Here his self-attested identity underscores the impossibility that national disobedience should have the final, unmitigated word. YHWH declares that, in the face of Israel’s rebellion and the consequence of exile to a foreign land, he will not destroy them utterly.

There chastisement will be punishingly severe. Yet it will not be final. YHWH’s instinct for redemption, his determination to rescue, to craft a future where there appears no hope of one will win the day.

YHWH is a free agent, a stunningly reckless savior of his people. Moral neatness flees before his will. Israel can depend on this, indeed only on this. Moral symmetries bring only death. YHWH, by contrast, refuses to go down in what we have learned to call history as the god who quite justly abandoned.

Justice is his nature, but it does not control him.