Narrativized ritual: How Leviticus works
Slowly, but surely getting to the end of chapter 2. In this section, I’m summarizing seven key insights / premises for reading Leviticus ‘these days.’ I’ve written out three, and I have four to go:
Section 2.4 – Reading Leviticus: Insights from Narrative and Ritual Studies
In the history of interpretation of Leviticus, defining ritual has been less important than distinguishing it from narrative. In 1954 Rolf Rendtorff declared in 1954 that Leviticus 1–7 represented the ‘purest form of ritual text’; and in 1981, Martin Noth famously distinguished between the narrative progress accomplished by P through Exod 25–31, 35–40; Lev. 8–9; and Num. 1–9 and the intervening ritual texts such as Lev. 1–7 that have “nothing to do” with this narrative. This widely shared preference for narrative texts shifted around 1991 when Jacob Milgrom published the first of his three massive volumes attending to the minutiae of ritual and sacrifice in Leviticus, and interest in ritual studies among readers of Leviticus has only increased since then.
Since the publication of Milgrom’s commentaries, a new approach to Leviticus has emerged. This approach has drawn from the tools of both ritual studies and literary analysis. Although chapter 3 will engage several of these contributions in detail, I begin here by outlining seven of the fundamental insights of this approach, which have themselves become premises.
The text of Leviticus contains both narrativized ritual (1–7; 11–15) and ritualized narrative (8–10; 16).
To avoid getting lost in the theoretical debates about the meaning of ritual, several recent readers of Leviticus have relied on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, who drew on observations from Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss to describe ritual as drawing attention to and making intentional the ordinary practices of everyday life. These practices can be said to be ‘ritualized’ when, for example, they are made formal, traditioned, governed by rules, and treated as symbolic.
As the conversation continued, scholars began to distinguish, appropriately, between performed rituals and written ritual instructions, or ‘textualized ritual.’ However, some of these scholars have continued under the ‘optimistic,’ yet mistaken premise that performed rituals are “functionally identical to” the texts which describe them. As Liane M. Feldman puts it: “the possible prehistory of the ritual materials is, at best, conjectural.” Thus, studies of textualized ritual ought to restrict themselves to the “well-defined and finite perspective” provided by the text itself, and ought to leave the analysis of performed rituals to archaeologists and ethnographers. Klaus Koch was right, even as early as 1959, to point out that the texts of Lev. 1–7 provided ‘insufficient’ data to reconstruct the five sacrifices as they are described. Narrativized ritual, then, refers to textualized ritual that is embedded in a narrative context, the way the textualized rituals of Lev. 1–7 and 11–15 are embedded in first in Leviticus, then the Tabernacle Narrative, Torah, and the Hebrew Bible as a whole.
This point bears drawing out in some detail. The form in which we have received the descriptions of the rites of the Levitical cult is a narrative. Rather than engage in the historical work of making imprecise projections of the mind of the author, readers are invited to undertake the literary work of attending to the voice of the narrator. The narrator creates an imagined story world and narrates a series of speeches and events that play out in that world for the sake of an onlooking audience. Leviticus begins, for example, with Yahweh speaking privately to Moses “from the tent of meeting,” about what he ought to tell the Israelites (1:1–2). The third person omniscience of the implied audience gives them the privileged position of hearing this word before Moses even speaks it. The first subject of Yahweh’s first speech is the “man from among you who offers an offering” (ʾādām kî-yaqrîb miḵem qorbān, v. 2), a man is only identified by his ritual role. One of the first things to notice about the man is his resemblance to his offering: curiously, the man is specifically described as miḵem (from among you), and his animal is min-habbəhēmah min-habbaqār ûmin-haṣṣō’n (from the beasts: from the herd or from the flock).
Just as the rituals have been narrativized, so have the narratives been ritualized. Nanette Stahl has pointed out that the ambiguity in the narrativized rituals does not resolve but increases in the narratives that follow. Bryan D. Bibb finds the difference between narrative and ritual texts to be “one of degree rather than kind.” For Bibb, the narratives in chs. 8 and 9, for example, “serve as the natural conclusion to the ritual prescriptions contained in that earlier material,” even as the “climax” to the part of the narrative that includes their description. The characters in chs. 8 and 9—Moses, Aaron, and Aaron’s four sons—and the events in which they participate, are not described in terms of their ‘historical’ features but by their correspondence to ritual realities. In Watts’s view, the ritual and narrative portions interact dialectically with one another, the ritual texts presenting Israel “‘as it should be,’” the “‘ideal cult and ideal community,’” while the narratives “expose the fragility of the divine–human relationship.” And as “biblical law and narrative are two parts of a persuasive strategy that depends on both to make its case,” the two genres “influence each other’s literary conventions.”
The primary ‘context’ in which Leviticus ‘means’ is not an ‘historical’ world but the ‘narrative’ or ‘ritual world’ the narrator constructs.
Narrators construct story worlds through description: by describing spaces, putting events into a sequence, writing dialogue, and narrating meaningful interactions between characters and objects in these narrated spaces and times. Rather than interrupting the Priestly Narrative, Feldman argues, the ritual instructions in Leviticus both reorient the characters of this world to a new social structure and have a world-building function for the reader. In addition, the ritual instructions “describe the ways in which the characters interact with those spaces and objects. Characters are imagined interacting with the space, with each other, and with the deity in ways that fill in gaps, draw new lines, and provide the physical and social circumstances for the characters to exist, interact, and move.”
Bibb helpfully explains the moral force of the narrator’s creation of this story world: “The editors created a text that calls readers to live within this ideal world of ritual purity and holiness; one does not need to know who exactly the editors were in order to immerse oneself in that universe of meaning… The historical ‘context’ that is really crucial is the mythological beginnings of Israelite worship, and this context is provided by the narrative that incubates and gives birth to this legal discourse.”
Its casuistic laws (e.g. 11–15) and casuistic narratives (e.g. 24:10–13) configure microcosmic worlds within this story world.
Assnat Bartor argues convincingly that the casuistic laws in the Pentateuch are ‘miniature stories’ and ought to be read as ‘embedded stories’ within a ‘frame story.’ Narrative readings of laws do not deal with the ‘abstract content of the law,’ but on the laws’ concrete elements: “the situations, phenomena, characters, and the events it depicts.” Even the way the narrator structures these laws discloses something about his personality, which is to say that it contributes to characterisation.
She takes the ṣāraʿat laws in Lev. 13–14 as a case. In this discourse, the lawgiver speaks in knowingly diagnostic, classifying terms: “it is a plague of leprosy” (e.g., 13:3, 20, 25, 27); “it is a scab” (13:6); “it is the scar of the boil” (13:23). Whereas the diagnostic procedure is carried out by the priest, who judges based on what he sees. Bartor notes the striking prevalence, especially in chapter 13 of the lexical markers ‘to see,’ ‘behold,’ ‘appearance,’ and words for various colors and shades, especially. The text characterises the priest as an ocular expert who maintains a meticulous practice of observation, recognizes signs that indicate the type and severity of the ṣāraʿat in question, and responds appropriately. Attending narratively to this legal discourse reveals the shaping of character at multiple levels: the narrator emerges as a discerning and orderly voice, the priest is cast as a trained observer and ritual diagnostician, and the Israelite layperson becomes a figure embedded in a system that is both theological and sensory. In this way, this law continues to construct roles, and orients the reader to a developing ritual worldview.
Reading narrativized ritual is not only itself a form of ritual participation, but also the new, normative modus of participation.
The ‘troubling’ points of ambiguity or tension created by this blend of ritual and narrative texts are themselves literary features, not instances of ideological conflict. As such, they are not primarily occasions for source criticism but occasions for interpretation. (Cue Kugel.)
The fact that the narrated sequence of the events of the Tabernacle Narrative does not match their chronological sequence is itself a literary feature. Reconstructing this chronological sequence helps readers understand the significance of the intentional narrated sequence.
Leviticus is not just an extensive excerpt of the Priestly Narrative (P), nor an extensive chapter of the Tabernacle Narrative, but is itself a book, with an intentional structure, including a beginning and an end.