NOTES for Lev 22:1-33

The system of ritual rules and prohibitions, especially for priests, as it is set out in Leviticus, may seem excessively formal. In fact, this is not merely religious formalism, although of course in the history of Yahwism it often degenerated into something like that. Originally, however, it was not form for the sake of form. The point is that a priest, by definition, had to maintain a state of consecration constantly; this was the meaning of his service. He was constantly in God's presence; he lived before God in the most literal sense of the word.

Such a life in a fallen world required special care toward what is holy. It requires the same care now, but today, after the coming of Christ, in the age of the advancing Kingdom, when death has already lost its absolute power over the world, the main problem and the main work are connected with ourselves, and therefore this work takes on more of an ascetic character. In pre-Christian times, however, the threat could come not only from within, but also from outside, from the evil that manifested itself in the world with impunity and almost without restraint, diminishing the fullness of its life and plunging it into the death that then reigned in the world absolutely. In such conditions, one had to be careful in everything that concerned God's presence, the sanctuary, holiness, and consecration.

All of this was absolutely foreign to the world; the world was an aggressively hostile environment for it, and its contact with the world was possible each time only through a special act of God. In those times any presence of God would simply have destroyed the world in which we live if God had not made His theophany compatible with its sinfulness. Such a joining, impossible for a human being but possible for God, required special care and caution from the person taking part in the process. Here, in essence, every step was a step along the boundary of two worlds: the world of God's holiness and fallen impurity, the world of life and the world of death.

The boundary ran both within each person, in his heart and in his soul, and this inner boundary still exists today; and also outside, where God's presence came into contact with the world, in the court of the Tabernacle, the Temple, and the priestly home. Today, after the coming of Christ, this external boundary has disappeared, not because we have changed, but because after the coming of Christ the world has changed, and now only Leviticus, with its ritual prohibitions, reminds us what this same world was like before the coming of the Savior.