Leviticus22chapter 22

Leviticus 22:1-3

Chapter 21 kept certain priests from the altar for what their bodies were. This chapter keeps them from the holy food for what has touched them, and that bar lifts as soon as they are clean. Verse 2 states the danger as profaning the holy name in the things Israel hallows, and verse 3 sets the heaviest penalty in the chapter, cut off from my presence, on a priest who eats a holy portion with his uncleanness upon him.

Leviticus 22:4-9

A leprous priest is kept from the holy food until he be clean, so the disqualification runs with the condition and ends with it. The whole remedy here is water and the setting sun, and verse 7 gives the reason a priest is restored as quickly as the rule allows: because it is his food. Verse 8 lays on him the rule already laid on every Israelite at 17:15 about what dies of itself, and verse 9 closes with the sanction and its ground, I the LORD do sanctify them.

Leviticus 22:10-16

The line is drawn by belonging to the priest's house rather than by descent from him. A slave bought with his money eats and one born in his house eats, while a hired servant and a sojourner do not, and a daughter married outside the priestly families loses the portion until she comes back widowed or divorced and childless. Verse 14 sets the remedy for eating a holy thing unwittingly at restitution plus a fifth part, the same addition required at 5:16 and 6:5, so the accident is repaid rather than punished. The Mishnah, compiled about AD 200, gives a whole tractate called Terumoth to who may eat the priest's portion, and it opens its sixth chapter on this verse with the man who eats in error paying the principal and the fifth.

Leviticus 22:17-20

The second speech widens the address from Aaron and his sons to all the children of Israel and the strangers in Israel, because the animal is picked out by the man who brings it. The standard is two words, without blemish, and verse 20 states the result of missing it as plainly as it can be stated: it shall not be acceptable for you. Malachi 1:8 holds a later generation to this verse by asking whether a governor would take what they were bringing to God.

Leviticus 22:21-25

The disqualifying words in this list are largely the words used of the priest in 21:18-20, blind, superfluous, scurvy and scabbed, with the broken stones of 21:20 answered by the bruised and crushed and cut of verse 24. One vocabulary describes the man at the altar and the animal on it. Verse 23 holds the single relaxation in the chapter, and it turns on the difference between a gift and a promise, since a bullock or lamb with a part too many or too few may be brought freely and may never be paid on a vow. Verse 25 closes the last way round the rule, because an animal bought from a stranger's hand is judged by what it is rather than by where it came from.

Leviticus 22:26-30

The third speech turns from an animal's fitness to its life. A newborn stays seven days under the dam and is accepted from the eighth, the day Exodus 22:30 names and the day a son is circumcised at Genesis 17:12, and a cow or ewe may not be killed with her young in one day. Leviticus gives no reason for that second rule, and the writers who reach for one reach across to Exodus 23:19 and Deuteronomy 22:6, where the same care for a mother and her young stands without explanation there either. The thanksgiving offering of verses 29 and 30 is eaten on the day it is brought, as 7:15 already required, so none of it is carried into the morning.

Leviticus 22:31-33

The chapter closes on the sentence that stands in place of a reason. I am the LORD falls seven times in these thirty-three verses and twice more as I the LORD do sanctify them, and the last three verses each end on it. The verb behind I will be hallowed in verse 32 is the one Moses spoke to Aaron over the bodies of Nadab and Abihu at 10:3, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me. Verse 33 puts the ground under all of it, that God brought them out of the land of Egypt to be their God.