American Leviticus: Postscript

We often approach the Bible like English colonialists bringing back pretty or useful plants from the "savage" lands for their gardens. There is perhaps no better picture of domestication than the English garden: flowers and fruits and trees trimmed of all their wildness so that they might fit into right-angled sensibilities. If one wants the beautiful flowers of the Hibiscus plant for one's tea, there is no need to travel to "barbaric" places if you have a lovely, neatly labeled specimen in your garden. There's no need to understand where it came from, how to survive in its native climate, or what part it plays in its native ecosystem in order to enjoy it. Look at the garden as a whole: everything has been extracted from its context and placed into a grid to please me, with none of its wildness left to worry me.

When I say that we often approach the Bible that way, think about how we approach something like Leviticus. The book feels uncomfortable and disconcerting precisely because it feels so wild, savage, and barbaric. We modern readers are too civilized for the gruesomeness of its blood sacrifices, for its distasteful rules, for its insistence on unintelligible taboos and lines drawn. And that's after it's already been translated out of its native Hebrew.

The way we deal with all that discomfort is to colonize it, to domesticate it, to segment it into legible squares with neat little labels.

• "This law must still be followed."
• "This law was a civil law, so you don't have to worry about it."
• "This sacrifice was done away with by the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Jesus."
• "This festival was also done away with by Jesus."

Once we're done segmenting the book up, there's quite a bit of it that we can safely say is irrelevant to us civilized modern Christian readers. And the parts that we'd say are still relevant—aren't those better expressed by Paul's letters, anyway? So as we stroll through the garden that we've cultivated, it no longer feels wild at all, but it also feels... boring. The #1 reason people express for giving up on their Bible-in-a-year reading program is that they hit Leviticus and it feels... boring.

To be clear, there's pretty obvious value to domestication, to making the world safe and ordered and predictable. This is what James C. Scott calls "legibility" in his book, Seeing Like a State, and there are good reasons why governments and administrators domesticate their worlds into legibility: wildness can be genuinely dangerous. Consider the state of air travel right now with the current state of the FAA.

But there are also downsides to carving the world into tidy little boxes. English farmer James Rebanks in his book, Pastoral Song, tells the tale of how 20th century English farmers went to great lengths to straighten waterways and order the land so that it was maximally geared for the growing of crops. This had the unintended consequence of making floods an order of magnitude more destructive, however, and so his life as a farmer has been one of "re-wilding" his land. Rachel Carson's environmental classic Silent Spring raises a host of other issues with 20th century agriculture, suggesting that while we may have figured out cheat codes for making the land more productive, cheating has consequences.

The major downside to domesticating the Bible, to domesticating Leviticus, is that there's really no reason left to read it. That's why I wrote American Leviticus. It isn't a commentary on Leviticus. It isn't trying to make the book safe or legible for you. In fact, it's trying to do the opposite—it highlights its wildness and danger by turning the lens on ourselves. It's easy and comforting to think of ourselves as civilized and modern and to see Leviticus as barbaric and savage, but the only reason we think that is because this is the water we swim in. Our rules, our taboos, our rituals feel right because we're used to them. That doesn't mean they aren't weird.

In American Leviticus I made the Super Bowl as a stand-in for the Day of Atonement. This wasn't to be blasphemous or even to suggest that the Super Bowl is really that great of a parallel. It was to highlight the fact that it's very weird for our entire culture to grind to a halt for a day so we can turn our collective attention to a bunch of men dressed in very specific garb who lay hands on a pig skin and run around with it. We don't get to snub our noses at Leviticus and say it's "weird" when we do plenty that an outside observer would consider to be pretty weird.

My proposal, if I have one at all, is to approach Leviticus (and the Bible as a whole) with the genuine curiosity of a world traveler who wants to comprehend a place on its own terms. Coming to the Bible and immediately asking, "How does this apply to my life" is like the colonial explorer coming to Brazil and finding the rubber tree and asking, "How can I bring this back to Britain where it can enrich my life?" It's okay to travel to the world of the Bible, for it to feel weird and wild and foreign and different. It's okay to fail at finding an application for a Bible verse to your life. Mostly I want to suggest that it's good to engage a biblical book on its own terms rather than immediately trying to "civilize" it into your own mental model of how things ought to be.

The last thing I want to say is that we as Christians get a lot of rhetorical effect out of describing our beliefs as "biblical," which is kind of an ironic claim when you think about how much of the Bible's ethical, legal, and ritual world we believe to be overridden by Jesus. We claim today that our non-Christian opponents are living contrary to God's law, but when we ourselves go to the literal books of the Law like Leviticus we find them boring, disconcerting, and largely irrelevant. My point isn't that we, too, should write off God's law, but that we actually already do while telling ourselves a different story. Instead, I'm suggesting a way forward where we re-familiarize ourselves with Leviticus itself and what it actually says by reading it on its own terms (among other books). Our American culture has its own weird, idiosyncratic quirks and rules and rituals, and it's okay that the world of Leviticus does, too.