Dissertation Leak #4

Section 1.3.4 – Studies of Analogical Reasoning from Leviticus

Other New Testament scholars have begun to recognize the discrepancy between conventional understandings of “Levitical sacrifice” and the logical internal to the text of Leviticus. This ad fontes return is helpfully explained by David M. Moffit in his 2017 paper exploring the heavenly tabernacle. Its argument merits a full rehearsal. Moffitt begins by pointing out that Hebrews models heaven after a specific kind of sacred space: the place where Jesus carries out the work undertaken by a high priest in that space on the Day of Atonement. But the nature of that model has been disputed. While some have (e.g. Mary Isaacs) argued that Hebrews makes a metaphorical model, Moffitt argues that Hebrews makes an analogical one. Leaning on the work of Janet Soskice, Moffitt explains that analogy “works by noting comparisons that… would be understood to identify fitting correspondences between the things being compared.” It takes two subjects that are enough alike that “numerous analogies [may] be drawn.” Metaphor, on the other hand, “construes a unified subject matter by way of a plurality of associative networks,” thereby simply “[generating] a new picture of perspective on the subject matter.” The choice of a metaphorical referent is utilitarian, or arbitrary; metaphorical models simply enable metaphorical reflection.

To assess whether Hebrews makes earthly sacred space (i.e. the temple) a metaphorical model for heaven or an analogical one, Moffitt turns to Jonathan Klawans, whose 2006 monograph had set the tone for analogical reasoning in New Testament scholarship. Klawans had pointed out that readers of Scripture often conflate the notions that (1) there is a temple in heaven and (2) that heaven is itself a temple. Each notion has a distinct set of consequences for the way we understand the relationship between earth and heaven. If heaven is a temple, that makes the earth into heaven’s forecourt and its own temples mere shadows, a reading which resonates, for example, with Philo’s Middle Platonism. But if heaven has a temple, then, in heaven as on earth, “there is an especially sacred space divided into various spaces and sancta that grow progressively more sacred.” On this view, the cosmos contains “two legitimate temples, as well as two legitimate priesthoods.” Because earthly sacred space has an analogical relationship to heavenly sacred space, the particulars of the Levitical cult remain both revelatory and instructive. A new covenant cultic priesthood would not be at odds with Jesus’s heavenly high priesthood, so long as it does not claim a conflicting logic of atonement.

Klawans’s book builds upon his earlier work, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, which itself had developed the insights of Mary Douglas’s work on ritual im/purity and Leviticus. He addresses the misreadings of Jewish ritual texts that result from anti-sacrificial and anti-temple biases and provides an alternative account, based on fresh readings of biblical, Second Temple, and rabbinic sources. From the beginning, Klawans argues, tabernacle-/temple-building was understood as an imitation of God, and sacrifice as attracting and enjoying the presence of God in the community.

Several other scholars have begun to reinvestigate New Testament texts in light of Klawans’ fresh interpretation of sacrifice and temple. Matthew Thiessen wrote an important paper demonstrating that Hebrews neither rejects nor abrigates Jewish law. Rather, it distinguishes between two cultic systems, an earthly and a heavenly, each with its own laws and priesthood. The “change in the law” (nomou metathesis, Heb. 7:12) is a change only in the priestly law; in fact, the argument of Hebrews depends on the validity of the rest of the Torah legislation. Thiessen also argues the law requiring priests to be Levites is still valid, which is why Jesus, born of Judah, must serve as a priest in a different realm: the heavenly one. Hebrews does not envision the “obsolescence” of the Levitical cult or call for its destruction; it specifically criticizes its expiatory functions and its continued monopoly on communion with God. In a 2020 monograph, Thiessen reexamines the earthly ministry of Jesus along the same lines: “The Jesus of the Gospels only makes sense in light of, in the context of, and in agreement with priestly concerns about purity and impurity documented in Leviticus and other Old Testament texts.” Contrary to other scholars (e.g. Thomas Schreiner), Thiessen contends and demonstrates that “the Jesus that the Synoptic Gospel writers depict is a Jesus genuinely concerned with matters of [ritual] law observance.”

In 2024, Andrew Rillera built on the work of both Klawans and Thiessen in his own reconstructed theology of atonement in Leviticus, by which he set out to put the final “nail in the coffin” of the penal substitutionary theory of atonement. In his second chapter, he unpacks the logic of non-atoning sacrifices: the ʿōlāh and šəlāmīm which Milgrom, Levine, and Anderson have explained were offered regularly to attract and to invite God to share in a meal with the people. Communion is the goal of the Levitical cult, and the atoning sacrifices functioned to purge sancta in order to accommodate the šəlāmīm, or communion meals. Rillera illustrates: “Atonement is what is needed for this holy residence-restaurant to maintain its grade A health score. The place [and the people] all need to be in a state of purity for the sacred meals to happen.” Although Rillera rightly relates the atoning sacrifices to the non-atoning ones, he makes a few mistakes. For one, he does not relate his discussion of sacrifices in Leviticus to other key passages in the Pentateuch, such as God’s covering of Adam with animal skins or the ʿAqedah. As a result, his presentation of the theology of Levitical sacrifices cannot be said to represent the theology of sacrifice in the Torah more generally. For another, he asserts—as does Milgrom—too strongly that, in Leviticus, the verb “to purge” (kiper) only ever takes sacred space as its object. He cites Joel Baden in support, although Baden himself disagrees with this point. (Notably, James Greenberg, whose work Rillera does not engage, had been able to demonstrate this with a more careful reading.)