Identity and Eating: A Christian Reading of Leviticus

A Peculiar Intimacy

The title for our conference ¹ presents modern Christians with an immense challenge that is both theological and cultural, namely situating ourselves as animals among nonhuman animals—or in more theological terms, as creatures among all other animate creatures. Situating ourselves among the other animals is an effort that we moderns rarely (if ever) make. We do have dearly beloved pets, but we normally situate them among ourselves, not vice versa. Our house pets—at least the mammals among them—get their identity from us. We might well think of the dog as an adopted member of our family, as something like a human, but that proposition is not reversible; we are not a member of its family. In the urbanized and industrialized world, living with an animal, even learning in limited ways from its mode of being in the world, does not make the normal adult human think of herself as an animal. As John Berger observes, in the culture of capitalism, humans ‘belong to a species which has at last been isolated’.” ²

In the present century this might seem the unalterable way of things, but the people who wrote the Bible over something like a millennium would have seen it somewhat differently. The line between animal existence and human existence was not as bright as it is for us, for the simple reason that humans lived in immediate proximity to the animals on which they depended for their livelihood, for survival. Humans and livestock dwelt often in the same small building. In the typical Israelite household, the youngest animals, or the most precious ones, spent winter nights (at least) inside, in the lower courtyard of the house, their body heat and odor enveloping the people sleeping just above. ³ There is little indication that Israelites customarily kept household pets in the sense that we do, although the prophet Nathan’s parable to King David of the man with the beloved ewe lamb (2 Sam. 12:1-4) indicates that such a practice might occasionally be seen as poignant rather than simply odd.

It is telling that the very first reference to humans interacting with other animals suggests a pronounced affinity, even kinship, between them. In the second chapter of the Bible, ‘YHWH God shaped the human, dust from the fertile soil …, and the human became, נפש חיה “a living being”’ (Gen. 2:7). Just twelve verses later YHWH God shaped from the same fertile soil all manner of creatures of field and sky, and they too are designated נפש חיה, ‘living being[s]’. The implication of kinship is reinforced by God’s act, curious in both senses, of bringing each new creature to the human, ‘to see what he would call it, and every one that the human called-by-name, a living being, that was its name’ (2:19). Naming creatures, which in the first chapter of the Bible was one of God’s signature actions, is now delegated to the human being. As is well known, naming is throughout the Bible a primary way of laying claim to relationship with someone, especially a newborn, or sometimes pointing to a new phase of life and therefore of relationship. Naming is an act of both recognition and intimacy. Part of the point in this particular naming scene, of course, is that no nonhuman companion can be a full partner for the human, and so God provides עזר כנגדו, ‘a help’ or even (in the translation of Richard Elliott Friedman ⁴ ) ‘a strength corresponding to him’ (2:18; emphasis mine). Nonetheless, the fact that a deeper kind of intimacy is desirable does not undercut the reality of genuine relationship between humans and other living beings that God has formed from the soil.

In the towns and villages of Israel, ‘a close, noisy, often smelly intimacy’ ⁵ between humans and livestock persisted for many centuries, common to all but the wealthiest. As a result, argues Roland Boer, the Israelite understanding of what constituted the kinship group, the household or clan, was informed by a certain ‘creative malleability’; domestic animals of various kinds were included. ⁶ We find numerous traces of such a flexible understanding in the Bible. For instance, some ambiguity about who are the essential members of the household underlies the notorious scene where Jephthah, going off to battle against the Ammonites, vows to make a burnt offering of ‘the one that shall come out from the doors of my house to greet me when I return safely’ (Jud. 11:30). We must assume that animals outnumbered people chez Jephthah—Boer posits between four and twenty animals housed in a single dwelling ⁷ —and therefore the returning warrior expected one of them to be the first to tumble out of the doorway.

Another unhappy confusion between humans and animals can be glimpsed through the major legal codes in the Bible, each of which condemns in explicit terms a practice that must have been common enough, namely of both men and women having sexual intercourse with domestic beasts (Exod. 22:18 [Eng. 19]; Lev. 18:23, 20:15-16; Deut. 27:21). In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the prohibition on bestiality sits adjacent to others banning intercourse among family members in various relations, as well as sex with the married neighbor-lady (Lev. 18:20). Notably, bestiality receives slightly more emphasis than intercourse between two males (18:22; 20:13). In short, in the Israelite village, the circle of intimates and therefore of potential sexual partners was not limited to human beings.

These aspects of the Iron Age domestic scene may seem so far from the modern urban imagination as to be irrelevant to our reading of the Bible. Yet we might consider that living spaces for humans and other animals had not changed drastically when, several centuries later, Jesus was birthed among the animal pens and laid in a manger—‘Christ and other animals’, to paraphrase Luke’s Gospel (2:11-12) and our conference title. Doubtless many more ordinary Jewish babies were kept safe and warm in feeding-trough incubators for some hours or days, until better accommodation could be arranged. Probably Jesus and all those others had a fuller appreciation of animal life, their own included, than do most of us.

Embodied Holiness: Leviticus

In order to explore in greater depth how the biblical writers and the people they addressed thought about human identity in relation to other domestic animals, I shall focus the rest of this article on Leviticus, the book that gives most concentrated attention to various aspects of animal relations, especially through detailed priestly instruction about eating and sacrifice. Eating and sacrifice are equally construed as religious acts; both are elements of a highly complex and theologically rich symbol system whereby Israelites may take their proper place within the created order. Through sacrifice and eating, Israelites locate themselves in a particular land and among its indigenous species, thus giving specificity and dimensionality to their embodied existence before YHWH.

Before beginning that exploration, I note here its purpose and limits. My aim is to show how eating and sacrifice may bear on an understanding of human identity within the textual world that Leviticus delineates, a theologically constructed world of enacted symbols. While I give some slight attention to the nature of these animal practices in the social world of ancient Israel, my goal is not historical reconstruction, even of the (small?) ‘Leviticus community’, whatever that might have been. Further, literary reconstruction, tracing the complex compositional history of the book over generations and possibly centuries of development, plays no part in my argument here, which focuses on the final form of the text. Rather, the goal is scriptural interpretation by and for contemporary Christians. I am interested in considering in the company of ethicists how this book, which is at least nominally authoritative for the church—although ignored or despised (even on principle) by most of its members—might yet inform the Christian imagination. Although I make no attempt here at applied exegesis, I expect that this major biblical witness can help us reflect on our vocation to holiness in relation to other animals in ways that are ethically consequential for Christians, as reading Leviticus has long been for Jews.

It should be acknowledged that the Christian practice of ignoring Leviticus, which has been more or less consistent since the third century—that is, after Origen ⁸ —is itself ethically consequential, in a negative sense. In my own (Protestant) theological education, the book was routinely passed over without apology. ‘There is nothing there but laws’, observed one of my professors, at a commendable university divinity school. I recall reading the comment of a respectable non-Jewish scholar at another illustrious university, to the effect that it is ‘abnormal’ not to take a personal dislike to the ‘author’ of Leviticus. ⁹ That comment is ignorant, of course; he might have reflected that Jesus unapologetically and in good rabbinic fashion draws his summary of the Law (Mark 12:28-31) from Deuteronomy (6:5) and Leviticus (19:18). But worse, the comment is ominous, granting readers implicit permission to hold in some contempt those who revere Leviticus, namely observant Jews. Traditionally this is the place where Jewish children have begun the study of Torah—logically enough, for it makes sense that six-year-olds should begin with what they eat. Surely Leviticus chapter 11, the lengthy priestly instruction on eating animals, is among Jews the most widely influential legal discourse in Torah, and that in itself reflects a practice of careful scriptural interpretation. It is notable and probably no coincidence that this chapter constitutes the literal center of the five books of Moses. If you are counting Hebrew letters (as Jewish tradition does), the half-way point falls precisely in chapter 11, verse 42—nearly at the end of the torah-with-a-little-t, the ‘instruction on animals and fowl and every living being that creeps in the water and all life that swarms on the earth’ (11:46).

It might be objected that for Christians to take much interest in the dietary regulations would be distracting and even perverse, since the very first generation of Jewish Christians abolished them, thus opening the way for the mission to gentiles (Acts 11:1-18). Yet, even if Christians should not try to reclaim these regulations in direct practice, we can and should ask what we might learn from them and from Leviticus altogether. For this is the biblical book with the greatest potential to shape our theological thinking about our bodies and what we put into them, about how we treat our land and the animals we eat, and also what their wellbeing means for the wellbeing of human communities. Concerns such as these belong to the mindset and lifestyle called agrarianism. As I have argued elsewhere, ¹⁰ Leviticus articulates a genuinely agrarian perspective; it looks at the wellbeing of humans and other animals in relation both to each other and to the land they inhabit. Further, its agrarian perspective is derived from a robust theology of creation; Leviticus recognizes that all animal life, human and nonhuman, is creaturely, God-given and wholly dependent on God’s favor.

The principle underlying all the priestly instruction in Leviticus is that YHWH is the Lord of Life, who gives Israel the statutes so ‘the human can do them and live by them’ (Lev. 18:5). That principle is given forceful and prominent expression in the prohibition on consuming blood (Lev. 17:10-14):

Anyone from the house of Israel or any of the sojourners among you who eats blood in any form—I shall set my face against the life [literally: ‘throat’] that consumes blood and cut it off from the company of its people. For the life of flesh is in the blood, and I have set it for you upon the altar, to effect ransom for your lives… (vv. 10-11a)

Despite the early Christians’ decision to relax the dietary regulations, this blood prohibition was retained. It is one of only three restrictions that the Jewish church in Jerusalem promulgated to the new Gentile believers, along with the related ban on eating the meat of strangled animals, and the more obviously ‘religious’ prohibition on food sacrificed to idols (Acts 15:29). On all three grounds, Leviticus and the early church both would likely judge most of our meat counters and butcher shops to be abominable, specifically because they violate the blood prohibition and more broadly because in our buying and eating, most of us practice idolatry, treating animal life as a commodity created by the God-almighty industry, and not as a gift and privilege granted by the Creator of heaven and earth.

Christian ethicists might be forgiven if they are not immediately drawn to Leviticus as a crucial source for their work, since in fact it offers few explicitly moral prescriptions or exhortations. In contrast to Deuteronomy, for instance, this book does little preaching. With respect to our subject, one might feel the lack of any statements about animal rights, rest or relief for our fellow creatures. While Deuteronomy exhorts Israel to pursue justice (Deut. 16:20), the central preoccupation of Leviticus is creaturely integrity—in its terminology, holiness. Everything that Leviticus has to say about animal slaughter, animal sacrifice and meat consumption is related to its insistence that Israel first observe God’s holiness and then seek to embody holiness in the ordinary course of human living. ‘For I am YHWH your God, and you shall sanctify yourselves and be holy, for I am holy’ (11:44; see v. 45). That Israel itself could achieve holiness is a wildly daring notion, as the priestly authors know, for they recognize a basic tension built into the structure of the world and Israel’s place in it. On the one hand, God’s holiness at its fullest intensity—as it is experienced at the sanctuary and especially in the Holy of Holies (see Lev. 16)—is almost too much for human beings to bear. On the other hand, ordinary human sinfulness, including Israel’s sinfulness, gradually accumulates until it is too much for God to bear. Sins, whether deliberate or inadvertent, are inevitable, yet they are fundamentally incompatible with God’s nature—which Leviticus names, without explanation, as holy. This is the problematic of holiness, as Leviticus presents it: How can humans, and Israel in particular, live in such a way as to overcome that basic incompatibility between God and ourselves? How can Israel host the Deity who aspires to ‘walk around among them’ (Lev. 26:12), as YHWH puts it, in language that is strikingly anthropomorphic, even incarnational? In answer, Leviticus sets forth the essentials of holy living primarily in terms of the sacrificial cult (chs 1–7) and the purity regulations (chs 11–17). It is noteworthy for our topic that pride of place among the purity regulations is given to the detailed torah (‘teaching’) on animal consumption (11:1-47), and that the first explicit call to holiness occurs at its conclusion. Holy living begins with regulated eating.

One of the reasons that few Western Christians are drawn to Leviticus is that it does not seem to make a lot of sense, as we normally make sense. Leviticus shows what enacted holiness might look like but never really explains how it works. How do the particular practices enjoined here conduce to holiness? When reading other books of Torah, we can readily appreciate the practical value of lifting a fallen donkey or ox (Deut. 22:4; cf. Exod. 23:5), not muzzling the ox that treads out the grain (Deut. 25:4), or granting Sabbath rest to all household members, including livestock (Exod. 20:10; Deut. 5:14). It is much harder to see the practical value in Leviticus’ insistence on restricting meat consumption to the three domesticated quadrupeds—cattle, sheep and goats—that have both a split hoof and chew cud (Lev. 11:3), thus eliminating some locally available food sources (such as pigs). Again, there is no obvious rationale for discarding high-protein animal blood (17:13) or farming in monoculture rather than the more productive methods of polyculture (19:19). In the environment of ancient Israel, where an abundant food supply could never be taken for granted, one can imagine that it would have taken some persuasion to win people to such forms of self-limitation. While there is likely a symbolic logic or even ethical significance to them, as insightful scholars such as Jacob Milgrom or the wonderfully inquisitive anthropologist Mary Douglas have argued, ¹¹ the important point to make here is that Leviticus does not employ the kind of hortatory speeches and logical explanations that make Deuteronomy so much more appealing to Christians. Instead of explanation the priestly writers offer a kind of showing, in the form of detailed rituals that constitute the enacted symbol system of holiness living.

The most concise and comprehensive statement of embodied holiness is chapter 19 of Leviticus. The carefully crafted chapter is formulated as God’s call to ‘the whole congregation of Israelites’, without exception, to ‘be holy, for holy am I, YHWH your God’ (19:2). The chapter is a summary of the basic teachings of Torah, with many parallels to the Ten Commandments, as the early rabbinic commentators noted. ¹² Accordingly, Jesus’ own summary of Torah draws on it as a source: ‘Do not take vengeance and do not bear a grudge against your kinfolk, but be-loving to your covenant-fellow as one like yourself. I am YHWH. My statutes you shall keep’ (19:18-19a). ¹³ Hearing that, Christians might for a moment feel at home in Leviticus. Yet, reading on to the end of that same verse, we are confounded by a complete breakdown in the distinction, often vaunted by Christians, between the so-called moral law and ceremonial law in Leviticus. Hear, O Israel: ‘Your farm-animals, you shall not breed in two-kinds; your fields, you shall not sow in two-kinds…’—no cross-breeding of animals or plants; mules are out. And further, ‘clothing in two-kinds, sha‘atnez-fabric—shall not be put on you’. Forget that nice wool and linen blend.

This would seem to be a drastic decline from the sublime to the truly ridiculous, but the text does not blink. There is no indication that acting in love toward your human neighbor is more important than or even separable from how you manage your fields or your flocks. Both are practices of holiness, as Leviticus symbolizes it, practices of human integrity that aim to mirror something of the oneness of God. Jacob Milgrom may well be right to suggest that Leviticus forbids cross-breeding, inter-planting and blended fabric because mixtures were conceived as belonging to the sphere of the divine (e.g., the cherubim were mixed creatures, and the hangings of the tabernacle are a blend of linen and wool). ¹⁴ Yet, as anyone who lives within any religious symbol system knows, explanations are far less important than repeated experience, and especially bodily actions, in shaping the religious imagination.

Symbols, both physical and verbal, are indispensable for dealing with anything too profound to comprehend in purely rationalistic terms, such as taking bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ, or removing a foreskin as a sign of the covenant between God and Israel. Human imitation of God’s own holiness is a mystery of comparable depth. The various prescriptions and prohibitions are not rationalized, yet their selection and juxtaposition suggest interactions among the creatures and correspondences between different facets of our material existence. Holy living is not fully subject to explanation, yet neither is it abstract. It is an all-encompassing commitment. As they perform or even envision these actions, Israelites may begin to see the fuller dimensions of their material existence, lived out day by day, season by season, in the presence of YHWH and also in relation to the other creatures belonging to God (cf. Lev. 25:23, 42), their human neighbors as well as the land and animals on which their lives depend.

Holy Eating: Three Principles

As Leviticus shows, the enactment of holiness begins at the sacrificial altar. The first seven chapters outline all the different sacrifices one might offer, for different kinds of occasions and according to differing economic means. Not everyone can afford a cow, but two pigeons will suffice, and if you cannot afford that, then offer some finely ground flour (2:1-10). Leviticus foregrounds sacrifice (chs 1–7), and a few chapters later it makes the longest statements in Torah about which animals are ‘pure’ for human consumption (ch. 11). Sacrifice and eating are connected, because Israelites sacrificed the same animals they ate—and most sacrifices were not consumed by flames but rather eaten, by the priests and the families who offered them. In the final section of this article I offer three related postulates that may express some of what Leviticus understands about how human identity is expressed through these twin animal acts of sacrifice and eating. Together they constitute a syllogism: