Reading Leviticus This Way Makes It Deeper | Christian Canu Højgaard

Reading Leviticus this way makes it deeper.
Many readers approach Leviticus as a dense book of rules and obscure laws — difficult to read, difficult to understand, and seemingly far removed from everyday Christian life. But what if the problem isn’t Leviticus, but the way we read it?

In this episode, I’m joined by Christian Canu Højgaard — pastor, Hebrew scholar, and specialist in Leviticus — to explore how the book functions as carefully crafted literature rather than a random collection of laws. We discuss how understanding its structure, themes, and original context reveals a stunning theological vision centred on God’s presence with His people, holiness, identity, and wisdom.

Christian also explains how reading Leviticus in Hebrew slows us down and opens up patterns, echoes, and connections we simply cannot see in translation — including a beautiful line running across the Torah through Leviticus and all the way back to Eden.

Whether Leviticus has confused you, bored you, challenged you, or intrigued you — this conversation will help you appreciate why it sits at the heart of the Torah and why it still matters for Christians today.

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Next episode, Nicolai Techow and I will explore the flow of thought in Galatians 2 — and why understanding Paul’s structure changes how we read the letter and apply it today.

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Chapters:

00:00 Coming Up...
01:05 Meeting Christian Canu Højgaard: Leviticus Specialist and Pastor
03:52 Learning the Biblical Languages: A Turning Point
05:35 How Hebrew Slows You Down (and Opens Up Everything)
08:45 Hidden Word Connections Only Visible in Hebrew
14:52 Leviticus Isn’t a Stand-Alone Book
19:00 Why Treat Leviticus as Literature?
21:47 The Surprising Structure Behind Leviticus
26:02 Laws as Identity: Not Just Rules
27:51 The Holiness Code: What Is It and Why It Matters
33:11 A Book Structured to Change Its Readers
37:04 Leviticus and the Big Narrative of Scripture
41:53 What We Discover When We Read Leviticus This Way
45:26 Isn’t Leviticus Just a Dry Book of Laws?
49:13 Law as Wisdom for Life with God
52:25 How Grammar Reveals Meaning
57:58 What About Tattoos, Rituals, and Strange Laws?
01:01:37 Leviticus as a Unified Vision: Holiness in Relationship
01:05:41 How Should We Apply Leviticus Today?

Music Credits:
Music from #Uppbeat
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Podcast Keywords:
biblical languages, New Testament, Old Testament, Christ, bible study,  Relationship with God, learn biblical languages, Biblical Theology, Christianity, Covenants, New covenant, old covenant, language acquisition, Biblical Greek, Biblical Hebrew.

Transcript

0:03

Leviticus was not meant to be kind of a self-contained book, but it's simply part of a greater story. It just continues where Exodus ends. What would you say to someone who finds Leviticus a dry book of laws? It's really about living in the presence of God. The theology of Leviticus, the ideas of this worldview. So I take literature that Leviticus is a literary creation and not just a random pile of laws. The laws were never meant to be kind of a rule book that were kind of you had a book and then you went to the courts and you made your juridical decisions. You don't see actually in the Bible that The laws were used that way. One of the climaxes of Leviticus is that God promises in chapter 26 verse 12 that He will walk among His people. And that actually refers back even to the Garden of Eden where God is walking in the garden. Welcome back to another episode of Exploring the Language of Scripture, brought to you by NT Greek Tutoring, the place for personalized Greek learning in your spare time. My name is Daniel Mikkelsen, I'm the host, the founder of NT Greek Tutoring, and a PhD candidate in New Testament Studies at the University of Edinburgh. And this podcast exists to make gyms from biblical studies accessible to everyday Christians and show you how the biblical languages opens up Scripture. And our aim is to increase your love for God and His Word. so you become more joyful witnesses for his mission. And today I'm honored and delighted to be joined by my friend Christian Canu Højgaard who is Assistant Professor of Old Testament here at Fjellhaug International University College, Copenhagen. Christian is also a Lutheran minister and he holds a PhD from Vrije Universitetet in Amsterdam, also known as the Free University. if you might not be familiar with it in that other way. And he's published several scholarly articles and he is also on the translation committee of the new authorized translation into Danish for the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, or whatever you prefer. In his PhD Christian studied the book of Leviticus as literature. Which also would be the topic for the podcast today. So if you are excited how we can approach to know what it means and how it will change our perspective or enhance our understanding of God's law by looking at Leviticus's history and as literature, not as history, mean, I made a mistake. Then stick around for that. I'm very excited to know what Christian's research has been. m This brings to light in how we can understand God's law. If I remember correctly, Christian and I, got to know each other at a practical theology course that Københavnerkirken did, hosted which was over the Porterbrook material, which is in the UK at least, known now as Crossland, back in 2012. And since then it has been many hours, spent lots of hours. over coffee or food to talk about life and theology, especially since I began my studies at Fjellhaug Copenhagen in 2014. So it's a great pleasure to have you the podcast, my friend. Thank you, it's great to be here and nice to see you again. Likewise, Yeah, anything else you want to add before we jump into some questions? No, no, it's great. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, it's a great honor. So let's start with your personal journey. How did you get into to study of biblical languages? So I studied theology and in Denmark you have to study three languages, ancient languages to get a degree in theology, Latin and Greek and Hebrew and I think many students are a bit worried about that and I was skeptical myself if I could accomplish three languages besides all the other stuff that we have to cover but I really like the languages, especially Greek and Hebrew because that's the word, the languages of the Bible. So was so fascinating to read, to start reading the actual words and not just the translation. And in Hebrew we had a great professor who introduced us to a new concept, where he incorporated some gamification so we had to play and Yes, we kind of played through Hebrew and we had a lot of exercises and tests online on the computer and you would get instant feedback. So that was great. So you could just spend hours and hours. You don't have to consult the teacher to know if you're on the right track, but the computer would give you instant feedback. So I think for me that was very helpful and a nice and funny way to learn the language. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I do remember Nicolai's there. Yeah, the Bible Online Learner. Yeah, so a big recommendation on that. Yeah, it is. Yeah. But as you've been reading the biblical languages, how has knowing them opened up scripture for you? I think, first of all, it really helps to slow down when you read, because you can't read it as you would read your everyday language, Danish or English or whatever. You really have to slow down, at least to begin with, and you have to look up words and you have to ponder strange grammatical constructions and try to see what is the meaning of this. And I think that's really helpful. And for me it was a big blessing actually to kind of slow down and just read it word by word and kind of give some time for meditation as well. I think then secondly, I think when it reads through especially In the Old Testament, which is what I do the most, when I read through the books and the chapters, I begin to see words that occur different places and I see that these words actually provide links between chapters and books. So can see this text is somehow related to another text. And the Bible really comes together, in my opinion, and it's really nice to see how... different stories, different books come together. And you can do that in a different way when you know the languages, because then you can actually see the real words and not just a translation. Some translations provide... different translations of the same word in different places because that's how we do. But when you study the real text, the original text, you can actually see how the authors might have seen the relationship between different texts. Yeah, yeah, the style, not just the style, also how they choose particular words to link to other. Yeah, sometimes it's very obvious that it shows particular constructions or particular words or perhaps a bunch of words, sometimes word place actually, but it shows that to kind of direct you in a certain direction and to point to other texts. So that's really fascinating. Yeah, this is fascinating. Yeah, both hearing the words in itself is like seeing the connection sometimes even audibly. But also, yeah, the connections I had with Seth Postell on the podcast, that he's very good with, like these links. Yeah, of course. mean, he's great inspiration because he's doing that all the time and sees so many links. I think that kind of oh studies, that kind of approach is very promising, both scholarly but also personally. It's nice when those things come together. Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any more concrete specific examples to what you've seen in the original that you didn't see in translation? Yeah, so I'm currently translating the books of Moses and it struck me when I worked with Genesis that there's some words that we actually know from Leviticus and other priestly texts and one of those is (תָּמִים) (tamim) and (תָּמִים) (tamim) is used in Leviticus uh as in to describe a feature of the sacrificial animals, have to be (תָּמִים) (tamim), they have to be blameless, have to be eh without any faults, they have to be perfect. So we use (תָּמִים) (tamim) for that. But then I saw the same word in Genesis and we see it with Noah that he was found to be(תָּמִים) (tamim). this blameless. And we also see it when we come to Abraham. So God commands Abraham to be a (תָּמִים) (tamim) has to walk, uh be blameless. He has to walk before God and be blameless. And that's very interesting that you have the same word in cultic texts with sacrificial animals, but you also see it in a kind of more ethical way with persons. And the interesting thing is that in the Danish translation that I am used to, they used different words. So you have one word for the animals and another word for the persons. Because in Danish and in English we tend to distinguish between what is cult and what is ethics and what is religion and what is, you know, moral. But it's interesting to see in the original text that the same word is... They actually use the same word for both situations. And I think it's because in the Hebrew thought, they don't see that big distinction anyway. It's more like whenever something or someone is going to be in the presence of God, you have to be (תָּמִים) (tamim). If it's an animal who has to be sacrificed... to God before the face of the Lord, it has to be blameless. And a person who is in presence of God, who lives with God, has to be blameless. So that was very interesting to see that connection on the basis of those two words. There's also something that's used when they talk about the clean animals that needs to be taken to the boat and when Noah sacrifices them after. So we even have a connection within the flood narratives. That's fascinating. We have the same problem with or interesting thing with like the... in Greek. with righteousness or justified. So in Greek it's the same word or the same word group. So, δικαιόω (dikaioō) which means to justify in English. You can use an old word in English called rightwise, which then you can make the connection a little bit better. But most people will never use that. But where we then translate the noun, δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosunē) we translate that righteous in English. But in Greek, they are actually connected linguistically. It's the same concept. Not that that's always the case, but in this case it is. We have the same kind of like disjunction within the translation. em Yeah, and that's sometimes just the case, you know, you can't, yeah, when you trace it into another language, have to sometimes make distinctions or use different words, where the original text used just the same word. That's just how it is. But then it's nice if we can at least achieve some kind of correspondence in the translation, to make sense. Yeah, absolutely. Or at least when we teach or preach, need to, we can make it more direct because when we write, I think I'm very much a fan of like when we do translation, it has to be understandable by itself. You don't have to use difficult words just for the sake of using difficult words. em Sometimes we need to use Christian words or Biblical words or words that is part of tradition in order to convey a particular meaning, which you have to learn. I don't have to use the word right-wise in order to communicate that this is linguistically related to the word righteous. Because... Maybe the person that is reading the text doesn't know really what that means and therefore they will lose the understanding of the text when I have made a translation. Exactly. Yeah, it's an old text anyway, so I think it's not realistic that we can produce a Bible that is just perfectly understandable without any prior knowledge. So I think a good translation goes hand in hand with good preaching and good teaching. Yeah, exactly. Very much agree. em You spend a lot of time working through the Hebrew text of Leviticus in particular in your PhD work, but also many other texts in your translation work. Without giving too much away, what we're going to talk about in a minute. So how has Hebrew helped you understand Leviticus or enhanced your understanding of Leviticus that you otherwise wouldn't have noticed in translation? Yeah. Well, I've already given an example of how words help to kind of create links between texts and communicate ideas, um concepts. I've also really been using the grammatical structure of the text. That's a different level, but it's also very enlightening when... when you compare the original text and the translation because you always have to choose some kind of structure when you translate a text but you can't really just copy it and transfer it directly. You have to make some choices. Sometimes you lose some of the complexity of the original text and sometimes you even kind of introduce new complexities in the translation. So it's really helpful to go back to the original text to show or to know some of the flow of the text, the augmentation of the text on the basis of the grammatical structure, sentences are combined and so on. And one example, a simple or basic example is how Leviticus actually begins, because it begins by, in most translations they say something like, and God called Moses and said to him. So he called Moses to the tent of meeting and began speaking to him. But in the Hebrew text there is no explicit subject so it just says he called him and the Lord spoke to him so when you just read it you think okay something is missing we meet who is the subject but then again you you you will have to look what precedes this text and that is Exodus and that shows us that Leviticus was not uh meant to be kind of a self-contained book, but it's simply part of a uh greater story. It just continues where Exodus ends. that is apparent from, you could say, the grammatical structure and the absence of an explicit subject. Yeah, because although Greek and Hebrew, they don't need a subject to make sense. You always want to have it clear to the reader who is speaking. Yeah, exactly. And usually when you begin a new paragraph, new section, a new book at least, you would have an explicit subject so you would know who's actually doing something or saying something. But here it signals to the reader that this is simply a continuation. It's just the continuation of Exodus. Yeah, for example when we read Isaiah or something like that it starts with like this, what's the word of God that came to so and so prophet. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a normal way. I think Leviticus is perhaps, I don't know, maybe the only example we have of a book beginning just like that. um there's something with Samuel, but Samuel is not two books in the Hebrew. Yeah exactly. Yeah, that's fascinating. Well, what brought you to study Leviticus as literature in the first place? Well first of all it was not me who actually invented the term Leviticus as literature so I'm not the first one to do that. So I was fascinated by a trend of research that kind of took another way to study the book of Leviticus. Usually or traditionally scholars would think of the laws of Leviticus as rather, how can you say, disparate and diverse pile of laws. Not really making them, perhaps they made sense, but they were not thought of as a unified whole, just kind of more or less random arbitrary collection of laws. But then in the 90s and with especially with Mary Douglas, uh there came a new trend of research focusing much more uh on making sense in a good way and in a positive way of these laws as kind of a unified system. Especially Mary Douglas, a British anthropologist. she started work with what was then known as primitive religions. But she had objected to that word because they're not primitive. uh The beliefs form a system. Impurity, regulations, taboos, all part of a kind of a uh meaningful, rational system on its own terms. And then she went into biblical studies and took the same approach and demonstrated that what we find in Leviticus, the food regulations, taboos and purity regulations may not make much sense to us today, but they form a system of beliefs. It's a belief system and worldview that actually makes sense. What I wanted to do was to kind of continue in that direction and try to uh expound on ah this worldview, this system of beliefs and demonstrate that it is actually coherent in its own. That's very interesting. Because when we talk about literature, can be a lot of things. We could even talk about low text as literature m in a very broad sense. So what do you actually mean by that in your approach? Yeah, literature can mean many things, but in this view it really refers to that this is a document, this uh is a creation, this is uh the creative work of an author uh or group of authors, uh whatever, but... It's meaningful and it is a creation so that those who wrote it or the person who wrote it actually wanted to communicate something and to persuade its readers about something. And it used these laws, the narratives that we have in Leviticus, the speeches, the exhortations, all these devices are used to communicate. the theology of Leviticus, the ideas of this worldview. um So I take literature the same way as Mary Douglas did and others with her, that Leviticus is a literary creation and not just a random pile of laws put together. oh Learning New Testament Greek can be a real challenge. If that's been your experience, I've put together a free PDF guide called Why Learning Greek Could Be a Struggle and How to Move Forward. Inside you'll find the most common pitfalls and my simple three step framework to help you start reading Greek with more confidence. Get your free copy today by clicking the link in the description below or the pinned comment. Now back to the episode. Leviticus is a literary creation and not just a random pile of laws put together. oh Yeah, so more like this is a coherent, like in this case, there's a narrative structure in some way, or a structure of approach and an argument or... It's structured, it's not that we can perhaps account for every little feature and it's not that that every law has to be in a certain order to make sense of it. So perhaps sometimes there would be a bit... about the sequence of laws, for example. But for the most time at least, we see that those texts are very carefully structured and with a very specific purpose in mind. But more importantly, they function together, all of these different laws, some deal with cults and rituals, other... dealing with ethics and society and sometimes they even kind of compile together and not in a kind of divided according to theme and so on but just a big mix of laws sometimes especially chapter 19 is a mix of different laws pertaining to almost every aspect of life in a way. But they all deal with uh what I would say is holiness and what it means to live in the presence of God. That's the kind of thing... the overall theme overarching theme of Leviticus, live in God's presence and that concept is what bind these themes together and that what make it literature. It wants to communicate something to its audience about this, what it means to live in the presence of God. Yeah, that makes very good sense. What did you hope to achieve by looking at a law, law text like Leviticus, by this particular approach? Yeah, I wanted to make sense of especially the ethical laws, especially the social laws in Leviticus 17-26. I wanted to show how these laws are not arbitrary, but... uh form a coherent whole that articulates, expounds um an ethos, an identity related to God's character. em Yeah, so the way I read the laws is that they are expressions of God's character. God commands Israel to be holy because he is holy. So there's some kind of relationship, an important link between God's character and the character he wants for his So there's an ethos in this book, identity. What does it mean to be the people of God? What does it mean to be in a covenant with God? And that is what is being expounded by these laws. So they express this attitude, these ideas, this identity that the Israelites are supposed to emulate. Yeah, that's interesting, fascinating. Why did you decide to focus on chapter 17 to 26 rather than like the beginning of the book? Yeah, to some extent it was also a practical issue because so my approach was quite ambitious. I wanted to make a network of all people, human and divine characters in this text and also map all the interactions. If I remember correctly, are more than 50, plus more than 60 characters, persons like the brother, the foreigner, the Israelites, different women. We have the blasphemer in Leviticus 24, his mother, Shilomit, and we have Aaron and Adam, so we have lot of different persons occurring along these chapters. And then we have lot of interactions among these persons, so they communicate with one another and they interact with one another, and there more than 900. interactions recorded in these 10 chapters. it was a big task to kind of put all of this into a data set that I could analyze. So for practical reasons I thought okay it's enough with 17 through 26 that gives me more than several thousand data points to consider. And also these chapters are somewhat self-contained in my opinion. They deal with holiness, they deal with social issues. So they're perfect for the type of analysis that I wanted to make, which is a social network analysis. While the first part of the book is a bit different. So yeah, it would be nice to do the whole book, because then you can actually different parts of the book, how does this network of people and the interactions develop through the book. The more data you have, the better for this approach. But I'll leave that for later. Or for others. um There's also some very important chapters in that book, like the Day of Atonement as well. absolutely. Yeah and depending on how you read it there's some very different views on the outline of the book. And some would take chapter 16 and 17 together because they both deal with atonement. Chapter 17 is about the blood that God gives to provide atonement. The blood is where the life is. And chapter 16, of course, is about the day of atonement. So in a certain... in a certain way they belong together. But then again if you look at the beginning of chapter 17 it also has a quite marked new beginning and a quite marked introduction with a new address to the Israelites and to the priests. So in that regard I thought okay it is at least permitted to treat chapter 17 through 26 as a sort of self-contained unit within the book. There's a long prehistory to that because for a long time scholars thought that those chapters were a holiness code and they still call so today. by many scholars the holiness code, some would say the so-called holiness code because previously it was thought that it was kind of an independent law code that was actually prior to the priestly code, the first chapters of Leviticus and some chapters in Exodus and Genesis but then at a later point was inserted into this priestly document. But from the 60s and onwards it was more common to treat the holiness code as an expansion to the priestly document. nevertheless most people would kind of treat this as quite distinct from the first part of Leviticus. in what way distinct and also what do you mean by markedness maybe that would be helpful for the listeners too. Yeah, mean, well, it's distinct in many ways. If you read through Leviticus, you will clearly sense the difference in terms of theme, in terms of the concept of holiness, which is much more profound in the latter part of Leviticus. Not in chapter 17. In chapter 18, have... It begins by speaking a lot about holiness, how people is called to be holy. While in the first part of Leviticus, holiness is more or less reserved to the priests. So there is kind of a tension between those chapters. We have the priestly outlook in the first part of Leviticus, whereas the second part of Leviticus... deal with the whole society. Moreover, in the so-called holiness code, we find many exhortations. You should do all of this because I'm the Lord who brought you out of Egypt. Or I'm the Lord, I'm the Lord your God. It comes again and again and we don't see it in the same way in the first part. So it's much more rhetorical in a sense and uses all of these exhortations. which we also recognize a bit from Deuteronomy, which is also very exhortative. So they are different in terms of language and style. There is also in the ideas they unfold. Yeah, interesting. It's fascinating how you can put... because also with the markness, like in discourse analysis, it's how the grammar flows sometimes. Yeah Yeah, and chapter 17 begins uh As I said quite markedly because it begins by the Lord spoke to Moses speak to The son the sons of Israel and Aaron and the sons of Aaron if I remember correctly, so we have this quite extensive speech introduction. It's kind of begins a new address and a new speech and a new set of laws. So that kind of separates it from what precedes it. not completely separate it because it's still part of the book. Yeah, of course. yeah, that's true. Yeah, but I think it's important to emphasize, okay, it is a full unit. But sometimes you want to emphasize certain things and in this case there is this clear distinction, like now there's something coming, it's very important. Yeah, you can say so. So it is a uh unit, in my opinion. The book is a unit, but it also consists of subunits. So it is made out of several smaller pieces, the first seven chapters and so on. And then we also have this bunch of chapters from chapter 17 through 26. but they can also be subdivided according to different parameters. Yeah, you can always divide things. em How is your approach different from like for example looking at The Pentatuch as Narrative as John Sailhamer very famously wrote about and Seth Postell later has like done again or is continuing that kind of approach? Yeah, Sailhamer was so important. He wrote his commentary in 90s and he was, I think, part of this trend of reading Leviticus and the Pentateuch in a different way than usual. And I think perhaps the same development took place in other fields as well. But what he did was to show how the Pentateuch comes together as a narrative. um And it's not, in his view, it was not made up of different sources, it was a creative whole. It was a unified whole that had a very particular message as a whole. In contrast to the documentary hypothesis, which postulates made that there are four four different messages, four different views that come together in a kind of compromise. So I think Sailhamer has been so important and also for my own thinking m in terms of seeing Leviticus as part of a story and I think it is because it's not made out of laws actually. It is more precise to say it's made up of speeches situated at a specific time and a specific space. uh And these speeches contain law. uh So, uh his saying has been so important for the field and also for my own thinking. um I have perhaps one objection to his approach and that is that it doesn't work so well with Leviticus and other texts that are dominated by speeches and laws. So if you read his commentary you will see that it is by far most comprehensive on Genesis and Exodus because that's where we find the primary or the major narratives, important narratives. So it's very good on the narratives, but it's perhaps not so good on speeches and laws. I was inspired also by James Watts, who has written about law, a rhetorical approach to law. So he would see how the laws are structured to convey uh particular message that the laws, the law texts are not arbitrary but are structured in a specific way to argue for some ideas and to persuade the readers or the listeners. So for me, that has also been useful to develop my own thinking about reading these laws. As you can see, part of the narrative but also as rhetorical devices. That's helpful. So it's more like seeing if we can further develop this and make it maybe more useful for those texts that are not directly narrative. Yeah, because Leviticus is not a narrative in the way we usually expect. It is speeches and laws. I think when we choose a method or a strategy of reading, we have to choose something that kind of captures the genre of what the text is. And I think other strategies like rhetorical structure, rhetorical criticism and... some other approaches are very useful, are more useful for this kind of book than perhaps Sailhamer's Yeah, that's helpful. And what do we discover when we look at Leviticus as literature that we otherwise wouldn't have seen? Yeah, so I think it's been very fruitful in the scholarship to investigate the structure of the book. So you wouldn't do that if you just consider uh it an arbitrary pile of laws. You wouldn't really go into the structure of the book because if you just compile something you wouldn't really think about in what way. But if it is literature, it's a document that wants to communicate something and it does some uh intentionality behind it, then you would actually think about structuring the document. So there's been many attempts to kind of... grasp the structure of the book and someone read it like kind of a linear narrative way so it begins somewhere and somewhere else and I think there's a good sense to that. Another approach is to read it as kind of a as concentric circles with perhaps Leviticus 16 and 17 in the center. and then concentric circles around it that kind of frames that central message of the book which is atonement. And some would also find some chiastic structures centered around chapter 19 which is more ethical. So there are many different ways to structure the book and in all... and that also has to do with what does the book want to communicate. But I think the important thing is perhaps not which structure or outline is correct because it's always a matter of interpretation. I think it's more important that the book invites us to explore it and to find some relationships throughout the book and see how these ideas unfold. for example, if you read it from in kind of a linear way, you would see that, it starts with the priests and that holiness, but then it expands further to the holiness of the people. So there's a kind of, you can see perhaps a development from the cult to the community. So that's one of the ways you can see how the ideas unfold. I guess I remember Seth said that if you look at the number of verses in the Torah, if you look at it as a whole, the center is actually just a few verses shy of chapter 16. Okay, yeah. Yeah, that's probably true, yeah. Yeah, and you can see the length of the books somehow correlate with Genesis and Deuteronomy are somehow similar in length, etc. So it kind of centers on the Leviticus, which is very interesting. um Yeah, and that maybe begs the question, what would you say to someone who finds Leviticus a dry book of laws? Yeah, I think it is really helpful to see that the book is not so much about the laws by themselves, but much more about what the laws communicate as a whole and what the speeches communicate. It's really about living in the presence of God. and what that takes and what that requires and what God wants for his people in terms of righteousness and holiness and love. So So the laws were never meant to be kind of a rule book that were kind of you had a book and then you went to the courts and then you looked into this book of laws and you made your your legal decisions. You don't see actually in the Bible that the laws were used that way. You don't see that Solomon the great king, he actually used the Torah when he did his, when he acted as a judge, he was appraised for his wisdom. So the laws has to do with wisdom and it wants to instill wisdom in the hearts of those who read it. think the most, perhaps the most obvious or the most apparent place where we see this is in Deuteronomy 6 where the father of the household is told to teach his children about the laws and he has to remind them of the exodus and how God saved them and that's the reason why we follow this law. But he also has to remember them and say them when he stands and when he sits and when he walks and when he enters his house and when he exits his house. So the laws has to be on his mind and and his soul and his strength and have to kind of fill his life and he has to live in this revelation of laws and history. So I think uh this is what the laws really about. They want to reveal something to us about an ethos and identity that we have when we belong to God. what he wants for the people of God in terms of holiness, in terms of righteousness and love. And we can see the laws as expressions of that. That in certain situations, what does it look like to follow God? What does it look like to be part of God's people when you are in this situation where you meet a poor man or a stranger or when... When you encounter all of these issues then this law is not perhaps a rule book to kind of apply directly to any given situation because it's not nearly long enough for that. It doesn't contain anything or everything that we would ever need. It's more like kind of a resource for spiritual growth and to grow in knowledge of God and use this wisdom to to discern what to do in particular situations. Yeah, that's interesting. That also makes sense in the context of that the king had to make a copy for himself that he needed to study for the whole rest of his life. So he had to be, I suppose that, maybe you can correct me on this, that he would... There would have been a scribe or priest or something like that that would have sat next to him and say... And then he had to copy it out himself. And then he will check if he had done it right. And then he had to... That was what he was supposed to ponder on or meditate. Yeah, he was a Torah reading king. That's what was his main duty, basically. And to use this wisdom to judge his people and to lead his people. um and if that's a concept of the king, the leader, I think that's also how everyday people should kind of reflect. Kind of starts with the king as the mediator between God and the people in that sense. So it's really an ethos that is articulated and expressed in these texts. Yeah, that's fascinating. It also gives a different outlook on how we are supposed to look at the law. not just about do this and then God is okay with you. It's more about understanding who God is and that relationship with God is what forms the way you live your life. Yeah. Yeah. In my own tradition, and perhaps also yours, it's very common to say, what in this law is authoritative for Christians today and what is not? So you have kind of a binary approach. This is outdated. This has to do with temple. This is a ritual. And because Jesus has died for us, this is no longer relevant for us. But... I would argue with others that it's much more than simply saying what is obligatory for us and what is not. It's more like what does this tell us about living in the presence of God? What does it tell us about God's character and what he wants for his people? So even though we cannot apply these laws directly to our own lives, and nobody can, not even the Jews, because they don't have a temple. although they read the laws much more than we do normally. they also need to kind of apply them to their own lives and kind of translate them to their own lives. I think that's really how we should approach these laws and see how they inform us about the life as Christians. um that's very helpful. Maybe a little more technical question here is that your work works a lot, focus a lot on grammatical participation and maybe explain what that first of all is. We have talked a little bit about it already, but does that actually help us in our understanding of Leviticus? Yeah. Yeah, my approach is fairly technical, I would say. And I'm very detailed and I don't claim that this is the only way to read Leviticus. I think it does contribute to an understanding of Leviticus. So the main principle was to kind of create a mapping. of participants and how they interact with one another. So I did attract the participants throughout the text so I could actually say, here we see just a verb, there was no explicit subject, but we had a verb, or we had a suffix, or some other small morpheme with some grammatical information. But then I could use this, the computer program that was developed to see how that refers, or which person it refers to. in this context. And then I would link all of this together for all the 10 chapters that I work with and then I could create a network of people. And I could link persons that occurred in chapter 17 with persons that occurred in whatever, chapters 25, and make this whole network of people. And the whole point of this is to... to be able to to kind of to get a picture of how these people were related and how this correlate all has to do with the ethics of the laws because it's very obvious when you read Leviticus is that is not that everybody has to do the same, but it's very situational in fact. So if you meet a stranger you have to do that, or if you meet a rich person you have to do that or not do that. And you have to treat different people differently in different situations. So it's very situational. And that is a bit strange to us today because we are used to modern laws. which are very abstract and they don't want to go into all kinds of situations because that would be, know... Yeah. would be tricky. But these old laws work differently. much more... They begin by concrete situations and then they kind of invite the reader or the listener to learn from those situations and apply to other similar situations. And what I wanted to do was to make this whole mapping or the whole network to see how these particular specific situations actually tell something about the relationship between people and how people are supposed to treat others in particular situations. And that allowed me to kind of get some more abstract notion of the ethics of this text. And it became clear to me that one of the main principles is um compassion so I have to show compassion to people in in marginalized people. So in my network I can cluster people according to how central they are in the network or in society um implied by this network and who are marginal. And I could see that the marginal person had some rights and the central and the powerful agents in the center of this network. they had to constrain themselves in their dealings with the poor fellows or the strangers or the women or whoever were thought of as marginalized in this society. m So I think this kind of contributes to this major, I would say, contemporary approach to Leviticus as reading as a kind of literature as a kind of of articulation of and ideas world views and ethos that that the Israel has had to To behave in a certain way hmm as a Reflection of God's character basically Yeah. Yes, the reflection for example, thinking of one of the more sort of arbitrary laws or maybe seem odd to us when we're thinking about for example, you cannot make a tattoo for example. I don't remember whether that's in your part of the book or... is in... Yes, that's 19 isn't it? em So the reasoning given for the tattoos is that... you shouldn't mourn the same way as the peoples. the gentiles, so to speak. em And in a sense, it seems arbitrary for us, but if you think of it this way, this makes really good sense that having a relationship with Yahweh means that you have a different kind of hope. And that different kind of hope makes you... uh that you shouldn't go out and do a mourning tattoo for your mom, for example. Which is actually something that corresponds to certain kinds of Western culture as well. Because you don't need to mourn in that way or do that ritual to honor them. Because you can honor them by living in a certain way. Yeah. And I think these rituals, morning rituals in that culture was related to the worship of other gods. So I think it's also a way of establishing some boundaries between this people and other cultures. They shouldn't mix with other cultures, not in terms of... uh of these rituals and other kind of cultural traits but they had to be distinct and they had to um look differently and behave differently to kind of make them separate from the other nations. Yeah, now you'll see, that actually helps us understand a little bit about what Leviticus is for and how it's supposed to be used as wisdom, as you've mentioned several times, as a way of life, as part of a relationship with God. Yeah, because I don't think it means that we could never, that we couldn't have tattoos or we couldn't shave ourselves, but it means that we have to um stay away from these kind of pagan... religions and traditions and it's worth one thinking how can we kind of physically stand apart from from the world around us. I don't think these verses give a very specific direction this is how it must be but it must provoke us to think about how we can be distinguished from the world around them. What does it mean to be holy today in all spheres of life? Yeah, that's very helpful. And what can we say about approaching Leviticus as literature At least for you, you see something that you didn't see in the text otherwise. Yeah, for me it's been very fruitful to read it more like a unified whole and to see how the different parts relate together. So that the most important thing is not just to take one law and apply it, but more to see how these laws are part of this whole concept of holiness and see them as expressions of how God wanted his people to live. So I think that's... this kind of thinking about the group has been very helpful for me. Yeah, I think it does seem quite helpful although you might when you say Leviticus as literature it might seem a bit abstract but it seems a lot more practical actually. uh It is a bit abstract because most people, or least many people, or Christian readers would go to this book and say, okay, what is relevant for me today and what is not relevant? But it's kind of reading against the grains of the book because you don't have any key to that in the book. It doesn't really say what is relevant and what is not. and the laws are mixed among each other so it's not very easy to see what is relevant today and what is not. So I think it's much more useful to kind of delve into this world and kind of see how these laws kind of reflect something in God's character. So it's in a way much more demanding because it takes time and it takes kind of you have to really think about these things and reflect and perhaps you also need to consult some commentaries to understand the cultural practices. Why were they supposed to do that and why were they prohibited from doing this and so on? So it takes some work. So my own... What can you say? My own... Yeah, I'm a bit worried or concerned that in the churches that I'm familiar with in Denmark, we spend so little time in these texts. eh Over a year, we kind of just perhaps read a bit or make a few cross references and that's that. um But it really takes an effort to get familiarized with these texts. And yeah, as you know, it's the same case with Paul and the gospels, because it's also kind of, you know, you have to get into their thinking, you to understand this world, because the starting point, the point of view, vantage point is their own world, their own situation, their own cultural background. um and we need to study that to really grasp it. And for that reason I'm a bit concerned if we only focus on very small parts of the Bible because we miss so many important things. Yeah, and that actually put us into maybe like a favorite question of the podcast, at least a traditional question here at the podcast, is that how can each of the viewers and listeners of our conversation here today apply what we've been talking about to the everyday walk with Christ? Yeah. Yeah, I like this phrase, walk with Christ, because I think this is really what it is about also in these books. mean, so Abraham is ordered or commanded to be blameless and his walking with God. So it really says that he is walking with God. And one of the climaxes of Leviticus is that God promises in chapter 26 verse 12 that he will walk among his people. And that actually refers back even to the Garden of Eden, where God is walking in the garden. So what Leviticus wants to achieve for this people and for its readers is this very intimate relationship with God that is to walk with him. So in that sense Leviticus is related to the whole Bible and to this major storyline from the Garden of Eden where God walked with Adam and Eve to Christ who walked among em his contemporaries and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit today. So there's this long storyline that Leviticus is part of. So I think that is one of the most important things, kind of as a starting point that read Leviticus with this in mind, that how does this life look like? How does it look like for this historical people of Israel to live in the presence of God? And then, m then ponder how can we reflect God's holiness and God's righteousness and his love in our own lives. And we can be inspired by the video because I think we should be inspired by trying to see these different laws and how God wants his people to respond to different situations. But we also have the rest of the Bible. and the new testament, most importantly of course, kind of unfold for us what it means to live with Christ. Yeah, that's very helpful. The walking phrase and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It also made me think about how important temple life was as well in the ancient world. em Which is an entire differently conversation. But these Leviticus related to that life within the temple, which was... very, very present within the ordinary life. Because temples were not just a place you came to sacrifice. That was where you lived, you probably dined with your friends there after sacrifice as well. And in that sense you were in the presence of God. that meant how did I conduct myself when I was there. and when I go out of there. Yeah. Yeah, the temple is so important to the Bible. It begins with kind of a cosmic temple, would say. And it ends with a temple, sort of, in the book of Revelation. um There was no temple, but God was there. That's what the temple is all about. God's uh presence on earth. that's, I hope the readers and listeners will take this in mind and keep this in mind when they read the Bible. This is really a whatever we read, whatever we read in the Bible, it's about a God who wants to be close to us and wants to have a relationship with us and we should not take this for granted. This is so exceptional to the Bible. The other religions of the ancient Near East. In those religions the gods were kind of distant and they were not reliable and people thought they had to manipulate the gods with Sacrifices so they could have their blessings and the the gods didn't really wanted to be associated with people and Because they were noisy and all that so it's really exceptional to the Bible that God wants to have a close and intimate relationship with us human beings So this is how we should read the Bible and see how God wants to have a relationship with us. Yeah, that's wonderful and I think that's also a very good end to... a note to end on. Yeah. That God wants a relationship with and he is very different than other gods in wanting to have a relationship with us. And that even to like atone for our sins, which the other gods definitely was not interested in. No. No, just the Bible is just so different. Also today you don't see anything like this in God who loves and is so loving and so righteous. So it's wonderful to study this text. and fully to be a part of it, in Christ have a relationship. Yeah. Live it. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for joining me on the podcast, Christian. Thank you, it was nice to participate. m was a great honor and to you guys out there. See you in the next one But before you go, if you enjoyed this podcast and you want more people to see it, please subscribe and leave a like. It really helps us create more episodes like this one. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Have a great day and I'll see you in the next one.