Canter Bridge

The severity of Leviticus would break the back of modernist understandings if read seriously. Most of us internalized such a view of the world with our mother’s milk. Individual freedom, the license to choose ‘a’ over ‘b’ without reference to any constraining tradition or community restraint seems as obvious to us as simple math.

The pursuit of happiness needs no explanation, let alone justification.

‘It is’, to quote an observation made banal by sheer repetition, ‘what it is’. (more…)

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It is precarious to seek psychological dynamics in a highly processed biblical text like Leviticus. Psychology is alien to its origins and purpose. Moses and Aaron are not presented principally as human beings with hearts pinned to their sleeves, but rather as prototypical Lawgiver/Prophet (Moses) and Priest (Aaron).

Yet only pedantic interpretation would force its gaze from the profound dilemma faced by Aaron in the wake of his sons’ death by divine fire.

Chapter sixteen is marked off as a separate unit by a familiar introduction.

Now the Lord spoke to Moses …

The words that follow are less formulaic, describing as they do a poignant circumstance as the lived context of this word from YHWH:

… after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of the Lord. (more…)

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The attempt to codify the Levitical prescriptions according to some logical scheme usually founders on the very arbitrariness of the distinctions enshrined in these complex directives.

When ‘distinguishing’—the word recurs—between clean and unclean, the priests appear to be training Israel in the art of obeying inscrutable instructions delivered to them by the enigmatic deity whom the Psalms would refer to as ‘the One of Sinai’.

It is a most un-modern concept, indeed one that rubs raw the sensitivities of all post-Enlightenment awareness, not least that of Descartes whose radical positioning of the thinking, reasoning, sensing self at the center of reality lives on in a million imitations. (more…)

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Jesus responded to an ancient Israelite yearning for vindication among the nations. The nation’s prophets, in their sunnier moods, foresaw a prominence for little Israel that seemed to defy the data and common sense.

What else is there?

A prophet’s vision, it would seem.

Yet Jesus resolutely sided with that version of Israelite expectation that divided humanity between the just and the unjust rather than between Israel and the rest. Part of his enduringly enigmatic message lies in that surefooted combination of Israelite particularity—it was so strong he once turned away a foreign widow by labeling her a ‘dog’—and universal embrace. (more…)

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The system of sacrifice delineated here would have familiarized the average Israelite with death before YHWH.

That was its most salient feature.

The fruits of soil and flock rise up through the agency of Israelite worshipers to create in the heavens a pleasant fragrance.

It is a violent and unsightly way to please God, unless one considers that the impress that one’s life makes upon the world is the cradle of something very good, something aromatic as it wafts into the Creator’s presence. (more…)

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Heroism is rarely alleged by those deemed to have achieved it. In contrast to the view from the sidelines, heroes are heroes only in retrospect. In the heat of choice, they simply find the resources to do the right thing.

Heroism is a tie that squeezes tight on the neck of the man or woman who knows better. She only did what she was trained to do. You would have done the same thing in my situation.

Maybe. (more…)

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The Hebrew Bible is stingy with assignations of wisdom. ‘Wisdom’, perhaps the Bible’s most polished virtue, is hard to come by.

Indeed, it is the elder rather than the young man who accrues wisdom precisely because it’s a long time in the making. If wisdom is a polished virtue, that is because it has come into contact with innumerable objects, not all of them smooth.

Israel’s sages are one of its most revered parties. (more…)

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It is not obvious in most of the biblical layers whether having God close is a good thing.

Indeed, such proximity can be crazy-making, sickening, even lethal. Biblical language calls this ‘curse’ and opposes it to ‘blessing’. Things can go just as wrong when God is near as when he is absent, a critical factor usually lost to popular religion. Better to imagine there is no god at all than to have him close and in a bad mood.

‘Mood’, however, hardly comes close to what the Bible intends to say. Intertwined with other conventions of a therapeutic culture, the word ‘mood’ evokes a narcissist’s passing emotional season, sometimes crowning each one with self-justifying canonicity. Such focus upon the human self is, at least in the book of Exodus, not under consideration, indeed hardly possible to imagine. (more…)

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The deep inscription of biblical language onto our culture is glimpsed in an expression of satisfaction like ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven!’

Even when spoken by a non-religious person, as is usually the case, it evidences familiarity with the idea that another sphere of life is better than this one, yet recognizable in terms of our experience ‘down here’.

Pre-modern cultures nearly always believed that their shared life reflected in some way a cosmic or celestial template. This, in fact, was the justification of ‘the way things are’ and the source of restraint upon an individual’s behavior for the benefit of a common good. (more…)

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Were there not enough graves in Egypt …?

So do harassed and terrified Hebrew slaves interrogate their would-be liberator as the empire’s strength closes in on them like some mobile Berlin Wall.

… that you brought us out into this desert to die?’

Memories of slavery are often quaint.
(more…)

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