Central Time, we will cover one book of the Bible until the whole Protestant canon is complete, and then we will start going verse by verse.

So these episodes will be roughly 20 to 30 minutes in length, and will be high-level overviews where we cover the following seven parts of our agenda.

Now, I know Leviticus is everyone's favorite book, but I'd encourage you to stick with us today.

It plays a really pivotal role in understanding what has happened in Genesis and Exodus and where we are going in Numbers through Joshua.

So let's hop right into point one here, where we talk about a book overview.

Now, summed up in a few words, we'd be saying priest, ritual, law, God's presence, probably.

I'm going to take you through a bit more of a thorough overview, though, and help you understand where we left off.

So in Exodus, God has established his covenant with Moses as a leader and also with the people of Israel, but they're not doing so good.

In typical fashion of the Israelites, even though they get to hang out with the creator of the universe and they are his chosen people, they seem to not get this through their head, and they are constantly failing him and messing up to the point where God has even told Moses now, you can't be with me, man.

So we start the book, and this is kind of actually cool because we see the direct opposite in the beginning of Numbers, but we start this book with God speaking to Moses on the outside of the tabernacle.

So God is inside the tabernacle speaking out to Moses.

Moses cannot come in.

And again, we see that fixed by Numbers, and the fixing happens with these ritual rites, these laws, these rules, because really, the breakdown of Leviticus is this, I, God, am so perfect and holy, and you, people, are so unholy and bad.

So let's get these standings laid out properly, and then I'll tell you the things you can do that will help you to get to me.

And these things just seem ridiculous, right?

It seems like the kind of thing that an ancient people groups who are nomads wandering in the desert might come up with, not the creator of the universe.

And these things are sacrifices and cleansing rituals, etc.

They seem highly pagan in nature.

They definitely have borrowed from other pagan roots and religious tribes around them, like the Canaanites who are so evil.

From a New Testament perspective, we're supposed to look back at this time and see this as the separation between God and people because of sin, and that God still, in his justice and love, paves a way.

The way in the New Testament will be through the blood of Jesus, the high priest of high priests, the ultimate sacrificial being, the scapegoat.

All of that is referenced because of what we see in Leviticus with animal offerings and the Day of Atonement with the scapegoat, etc.

We also have some focus on priesthood here.

We have Aaron and his sons becoming kind of the first priest and setting this long lineage, which is so important and we'll derive downwards because it was only the priest who could be as pure as possible to enter the Holy of Holies within the tabernacle and to have these communicative and ritualistic rites that allow them to intervene between God and people.

We'll get into this in more detail as we go through the themes and the literary analysis and the misconceptions and errors, etc. coming up.

Point two, though, which is going to be authorship and date, is going to be even quicker than last time because this is pretty much the same as it was for Genesis.

If you want to see episode one, point two, where we talk about authorship and date, I'll leave a link and a time mark for you there so you can get the full, nice five-minute overview of who wrote the Pentateuch, that being the first five books of the Bible, and when.

Again, your main two sources here are going to be Moses did it, which doesn't really make sense, and I've explained that, and something called the documentary theory where we're looking at four different sources combined that were combined around the 6th century BCE during the Babylonian captivity or shortly thereafter as a way to kind of group these people finally together to take all of the oral stories and written traditions, etc.

Even though there's different accountings of them and some are borrowed and some are original and some contradict, let's just mash them all together best we can.

We'll scrape it out, we'll see what sticks, and that is our first five books of the Bible.

This is the Torah.

I guess the one thing that might be unique to Leviticus is to understand that again, after that exile in Babylon, they're coming together again as a people group and trying to say like, okay, who are we?

What do we believe?

What is our roots and how do we stay together?

What is our cohesive defining features?

That's what's happening in Leviticus, right?

They've come out of captivity in Egypt, at least according to the story, and they are now a new people group and they now are wandering and lost and having to rebuild identity.

Identity is such a huge deal through these first few books of the Bible as we establish this chosen people group and we give more detail to that identity and that is a big part of Leviticus as well.

In terms of timing, aside from when it was written, but when these events were supposed to be happening, there's not much in Leviticus saying how long this period is covered or how far after certain events in Exodus, but if we look at numbers, we can see a very specific timeframe.

It's like the first day of the second month of the second year.

So 26 months and a day essentially since they left Egypt is when number starts, which seems to be picking up right after the end of Leviticus.

So at least some of Leviticus we can just know is around the second year.

How far it goes back in these events is kind of hard to say and most of this is them hanging out around Sinai.

You know, they're wandering for 40 years and something that's interesting to note that we see at the end of Exodus is once the tabernacle is established, God likes to just chill for a while and he shows himself as this pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night and that rests directly within and over the tabernacle.

And as long as that cloud was in the tabernacle, don't pack up the tent.

We're not going anywhere.

When that cloud would start to move, all the rituals of how we treat the tabernacle and take it down and pack it up and how we're going to transition it and move it, et cetera, to follow the cloud to the next resting place, that begins.

So a lot of people like to say, hey, it should have been an 11 day walk from leaving Egypt until Canaan.

Why did it take 40 years?

God wasn't trying to do it directly according to the story.

This is a 40 years and that number 40 is very important.

It usually symbolizes a time of testing, like with Jesus, 40 days of fasting or the 40 days that it rained during the flood in Genesis, et cetera, 40 is this trial period.

So he's got to iron out the details with his people.

He has to help them figure out who they are, what their laws are, how to keep those laws, how to atone when they break those laws, how to become pure like him before he can take them to the promised land.

Again, this is the biblical setup.

I'm not saying that this actually happened or that there is this God or that this is actually his intention, but this is the heart of the story.

So I just kept talking there and I've been in point three here for a minute, which is historical background and accuracy.

And there's not a whole lot we can say here because again, this doesn't take place on a grander scale like with Egypt and we can compare the Egyptian records to this.

This is just them now.

They're alone.

They're in the wilderness.

It's their word and their God.

That's all we've got.

What we can see in terms of understanding something of history is that this is an ancient Near Eastern tribe and that there are a lot of similarities between ancient Near Eastern tribes that have storm or war gods that represent them as a people group that help them prosper, do well in battle, and take over neighboring nations.

That is what is happening here in Leviticus.

And so we can see a reflection of the time and that these people had a very similar concept of things as their neighbors did, whether we're talking about slavery, whether we're talking about cleanliness, right?

Like it's interesting to think about what was their idea of what made them unclean.

Now, some of it was theological and spiritual, but some of that even was based off just an idea of, well, that's associated with death.

So you see a lot of how you become unclean in Leviticus and the main things are touching things that are unclean.

So this could be certain kinds of meat.

This could be dead bodies.

This could be certain bodily fluids.

And this was par for the course at this time that when we still didn't understand germ theory, we had some kind of an understanding that disease lingered.

And if you touched diseased skin, your skin would then get diseased, et cetera.

And we didn't have the right words or science to put to it.

But we had a cultural understanding of unclean and impure and clean and pure and applying that to the theology of a perfect God in a very clean union.

We have to understand the physical things that will make us unclean.

So again, this is kind of the points I've mentioned in other videos where we focus so much on what women should do when they're menstruating and what men should do if they have a wet dream.

Both of these are covered in Leviticus, by the way, as well as a ton of other stuff that you would just think is asinine.

But it might have been important to this people group at an earlier time as they're really trying to establish right from wrong, good from bad, clean from ugly, et cetera.

And though I agree that it's unnecessary to have this much level of detail in comparison to say how much we talk about that people should be free or that all people are equal or that children should not be sexually abused, et cetera.

Like we have this disproportionate focus from supposedly the creator of the universe at his first iteration of giving rule and law to his people.

A lot of people like to look at the fact that this is Mosaic law or Levitical law and that it has been usurped by the blood of Jesus and that these things we are no longer bound to.

From a Christian perspective, we've all but done away with all of these rules and laws except when we're still hung up on homosexuality or we don't like the idea of tattoos and then we'll bring out some of these Levitical laws and say, look, abomination, look, you're marking yourself for the dead, et cetera.

But very few Christians have any qualms with being around their wife when she's menstruating or the waiting period they need to address after they've had a nightly omission.

And I see almost no one in the Christian community for reasons that apply to the Levitical laws staying away from pork.

So in my opinion, if these laws are really for these people at this time in this context, let's leave them there and not cherry pick this like we do.

I talk about this quite a bit in my video from last Sunday where we talked about gay marriage and a lot of it is founded right here in Leviticus.

Also in my video about quantifying the Bible and understanding who God is by the word count and data that's provided in this 800,000 word tome, we see an overemphasis on these things that seemingly don't matter at all compared to things that a moral and just God should have been talking about more.

I digress.

It's not the point of a secular Bible study.

We'll move on to literary analysis here for point four.

So similar to Exodus, our main genre here is that of ancient Near Eastern legal or law or ritual.

This is all done in a very similar fashion.

It all uses a lot of the same literary techniques.

One of those techniques that is employed often in this kind of genre is that of repetition.

We need to drive a point home.

You'll see things said multiple times or in groups of three or listed forwards and then backwards.

Then we typically see a secondary layer of detailed instructions to back up the first And then in case this wasn't clear enough, we'll do a third layer of symbolic imagery.

So we see this with the detail of the law again being don't do this.

This is forbidden.

Avoid this.

Right.

The repetition saying it in different ways.

And then the symbolic we'll see with like the blood.

We need imagery to help us understand that it is the blood of this animal that has died or the scent of the burning flesh of the animal that has pleased God.

And it's this pleasing motion to God or this atonement notion for God that allows him to We are clean.

Right.

Doing the law keeps us clean.

Making the sacrifice makes us atoned, but we needed imagery and that imagery has become so important.

Think about the blood of Christ.

It's the simple fact of Christ's death that equals atonement, but we've connected it with his blood specifically in parts because it was very much tied to pagan rituals of blood magic where you would actually utilize the blood in some capacity for the magic.

But here we've made it more of a symbolic gesture about the blood of Christ covering.

We see this again with the Passover where we're painting blood on the door back in Exodus so that the angel of death passes over the houses and does not kill their firstborn.

It was blood magic that protected these people.

But in concluding this point, I mean, it is just highly structurized.

We see a beginning part where we are listing rituals, laws, and priesthood.

We see a middle part with the day of atonement, and then we see a reflection back to those laws and priestly rituals on the back end as well.

Point five here is going to be our main themes.

And I'm not sure how many different themes I'm going to list, but I know I want to start with religious rituals.

There's multiple kinds of rituals done by multiple people for multiple reasons.

But when we talk about sacrifice, which is the first one I want to point out, it really comes down to two kinds of sacrifices.

And this is right at the beginning of Leviticus.

You have sacrifices to say thank you to God and you have sacrifices to say, uh oh, I sinned.

Let's make this better.

So I'm going to get my Bible out so I can be a little more precise because it's just easier to read the headings here.

But you have laws for burnt offerings, grain offerings, peace offerings.

That's one, two, and three.

Four is sin offerings.

In five, we get to guilt offerings.

And then in six, we start getting into the priesthood.

So those first five kinds of offerings really break down into those two main categories to say thanks or to say sorry.

It's interesting to talk about the guilt and peace offerings, but not nearly as interesting to talk about the burnt offerings.

I think it's either 42 or 47 times is listed God saying how much he loves the smell of And this is how gods of the ancient Near East, by the way, consumed their sacrifices.