Leviticus17chapter 17

Leviticus 17:1-2

Chapter 16 was spoken to Moses for Aaron alone, and this one is spoken to Aaron, to his sons, and to all the children of Israel together. The holiness code that runs from here to chapter 26 opens by widening its audience, so what follows is laid on the whole nation and not on the priesthood only. The formula this is the thing which the LORD hath commanded gives the rule no ground beyond the command itself, which is how most of Leviticus argues.

Leviticus 17:3-4

Every ox, lamb and goat killed in the camp or outside it has to come to the door of the tabernacle, and the man who kills one anywhere else has blood imputed to him. He hath shed blood is the language Genesis 9:6 uses of murder, so the life of the animal is held to belong to God and taking it privately is charged as a crime against him. Deuteronomy 12:15 and 12:20-24 later allow slaughter for food far from the sanctuary, which named commentators read as the release of a rule fitted to a nation camped around one tent.

Leviticus 17:5-7

Verse 7 gives the reason the two verses before it withhold. Sacrifice in the open field was going to devils, and the Hebrew word there is se'irim, hairy ones or goats, which Adam Clarke ties to the goat worship Israel had lived beside in Egypt. The text calls it going a whoring, language it uses because the nation is held to be married to God, so a sacrifice laid on another power breaks a bond rather than misplaces a ritual. Verse 5 turns every animal killed for meat into a peace offering, which puts a priest and an altar inside the family meal.

Leviticus 17:8-9

The same law binds the stranger that sojourneth among Israel, and this chapter says so five times in sixteen verses, at 8, 10, 12, 13 and 15. A foreigner living in the camp is held to the door of the tabernacle and to the blood, whatever else of Israel's law falls to him. Leviticus 16:29 had already put him under the day of atonement on the same terms as one of their own country.

Leviticus 17:10-11

Verse 10 carries the only threat in the chapter that God executes in the first person, I will even set my face against that soul, with no court and no priest in between. Verse 11 gives the reason, and it is the one place in the Torah where the sacrificial system states its own ground: the life of the flesh is in the blood, God has given it upon the altar, and it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. Genesis 9:4 had withheld blood from Noah before there was an altar or a priesthood, and this verse is where that restriction is finally explained. Hebrews 9:22 takes the sentence up as without shedding of blood is no remission.

Leviticus 17:12-14

The prohibition is stated three times in five verses, at 10, 12 and 14, which is how Leviticus marks weight. Verse 13 covers the hunter, whose beast or fowl cannot go on the altar at all, and his blood is poured out and covered with dust, so it is buried where it fell. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 AD, gives that one act its own body of law in tractate Chullin as kisui ha-dam, the covering of the blood, and kosher slaughter keeps it still. Acts 15:20 and 15:29 carry the blood rule into the church's first council, which is worth saying plainly because a reader assumes every Levitical rule stopped.

Leviticus 17:15-16

The chapter closes with the lightest penalty in it. A carcase that died of itself or was torn still holds its blood, so eating it defiles, and the remedy is washing the clothes, bathing, and uncleanness until the even. The heavier sentence falls on the man who refuses the washing, and of him the text says he shall bear his iniquity. Acts 15:20 sets things strangled beside blood in one clause, which is this case, and Ezekiel 44:31 lays the same rule on the priests by name.