Post-biblical Jewish literacy tended to start kids with reading Leviticus (Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine)

According to Lev. R. 7:3 (p. 156 in the Margoliot ed.), it is argued that Leviticus is the best starting point for children since it deals with sacrifices which are pure just as children are
pure.

Leviticus 1-7 is less hortatory than, for example, Deuteronomy, the Wisdom literature, the prophets or the priestly Holiness Code (Lev. 17-27). As a result, readers of the Bible are
struck by these chapters’ systematic, impersonal, and repetitive style.

1:1 The Lord called Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, 2 “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When any one of you brings an offering to
the Lord, you shall bring your offering of livestock from the herd or from the flock.
Direct speech by God through Moses to people and priests (cf. 4:1; 5:154;20;
6:1,12,17; 7:22,28)

The purpose of the text is to persuade readers and hearers to engage in certain
behaviors and not others.

The systematic and repetitive style seems redundant to a silent reader but can sound
very motivating to a skilled speaker’s audience → it helps the audience anticipate a
speaker’s direction and respond appropriately to the speaker’s cues.

God is represented as a speaker who, through Moses, urges

people and priests to engage in specific behaviors. If these speeches
seem much less vivid than other biblical texts, that is only because the
hortatory emphasis is even more pronounced elsewhere.
Repetitive elements

“a fire-offering of soothing scent for YHWH,” 1:9, 13, 17; 2:2, 9, 11, 16; 3:5, 16;
“the priest will make atonement for them and they will be forgiven,” 4:20, 26, 31, 35;
5:6, 10, 13, 16, 18, 26

Major shifts in structure draw

special attention and mark climaxes, such as the prohibition on con-
suming fat and blood (3:16b–17) that breaks out of and concludes the
description of routine offerings in Leviticus 1–3. Damrosch rightly
noted that the three-fold structure of Leviticus 1–3 “gives these chap-
ters a certain lyrical aspect” and that the presentation of the offerings
is staged dramatically. 57 Despite the long-standing tradition of reading
such repetitive structures as dull and uninspiring, their effect in oral
readings would instead be exciting and motivating. Indeed, since repe-
tition and refrains often mark the climax of speeches, their appearance
here provides further evidence that the Pentateuch reaches its climax
in Leviticus. 58

One effect of presenting the major offerings twice, once explicitly

addressed to the people of Israel as a whole (chapters 1–5) and once
explicitly addressed to the priests (6:1–7:21), is to subject both groups
to the words that God spoke to Moses, that is, to this law

3 “If his offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he shall offer a male without blemish. He shall bring it to the entrance of the tent of meeting, that he may be accepted before
the Lord. 4 He shall lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. 5 Then he shall kill the bull before the Lord, and
Aaron's sons the priests shall bring the blood and throw the blood against the sides of the altar that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting. 6 Then he shall flay the burnt offering
and cut it into pieces, 7 and the sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire.8 And Aaron's sons the priests shall arrange the pieces, the head,
and the fat, on the wood that is on the fire on the altar; 9 but its entrails and its legs he shall wash with water. And the priest shall burn all of it on the altar, as a burnt offering, a
food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord.
10 “If his gift for a burnt offering is from the flock, from the sheep or goats, he shall bring a male without blemish, 11 and he shall kill it on the north side of the altar before the Lord,
and Aaron's sons the priests shall throw its blood against the sides of the altar. 12 And he shall cut it into pieces, with its head and its fat, and the priest shall arrange them on the
wood that is on the fire on the altar, 13 but the entrails and the legs he shall wash with water. And the priest shall offer all of it and burn it on the altar; it is a burnt offering, a food
offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord.
14 “If his offering to the Lord is a burnt offering of birds, then he shall bring his offering of turtledoves or pigeons. 15 And the priest shall bring it to the altar and wring off its head
and burn it on the altar. Its blood shall be drained out on the side of the altar. 16 He shall remove its crop with its contents and cast it beside the altar on the east side, in the place
for ashes. 17 He shall tear it open by its wings, but shall not sever it completely. And the priest shall burn it on the altar, on the wood that is on the fire. It is a burnt offering, a food
offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord.

Ritual relies for its power on the face that it is concerned with quite ordinary activities placed within an extraordinary setting, that what it describes and displays is, in principle,
possible for every occurrence of these acts.
 Ritual turns everyday routings such as washing oneself, entering and leaving a room, and eating meals into deeply meaningful practices by focusing attention on them,
formalizing them, and, often, by prescribing precisely how they get done.
Systematic relationship between purity regulations and sacrificial practices and his search for how such practices reinforce ethical norms → they are not just “primitive” practices
but have rationale

“Leviticus presents its philosophical

doctrines in the form of rules of behaviour. Its paradigm lesson about
God and existence is enacted on the body of a sacrificial animal, or
on the altar, or on the body of a human person – Mary Douglas

Most ancient and traditional societies explained ritual purifi-

cation as a means for expiating demonic influences. Biblical writers,
however, rejected sacrificial divination and beliefs in demons out of
hand, leaving the ritual systems of sacrifice and purification largely
without a theoretical justification

This is the most plausible of Douglas’s major theses. Unlike the

others, it is supported by passages in Leviticus that explicitly condemn
ritual divination of various sorts (Lev 19:26, 31; 20:6, 27). It also explains
something that has puzzled interpreters for millennia, namely, the
book’s failure to interpret the meaning of sacrifices and other rituals.
Douglas suggested that the absence of ritual explanations is part and
parcel of the polemic against other religious systems: the theory of demonic influences has been deliberately stripped from Israel’s ritual
system, leaving little theoretical explanation for the practices.

Leviticus describes a theological cosmology and microcosmic analogies

no more than it does a demonology. One might insist, as Douglas does,
that the priestly writers must have filled this explanatory gap in some
way or another. Perhaps they did, but they did not write those explana-
tions down in Leviticus. If the expulsion of demon beliefs from Israel’s
religion created a deficit of theoretical explanations for temple rituals,
Leviticus does nothing to supply them.

Texts are not rituals: there are gaps in the accounts of the rituals which make it impossible to reconstruct the whole ritual → so we must ask the question why the text includes
what it does.

Some rituals do claim divine or semi-diving authorship of key rituals and this claim is sometimes used by authors and speakers to try
to define their meaning (biblical examples include quotations of Moses
about Passover in Exod 12:24–27 and of Jesus about the Eucharist in 1 Cor 11:23–26), they more often simply authorize the practice itself
(Moses about the Day of Atonement in Lev 16, Jesus about baptism in
Matt 28:19). Claims to divine authorship of rituals are patent attempts
to persuade readers to perform the rites and, perhaps, to interpret
them in a particular way.

Interpretation of ritual
The meaning of any action not only varies with the way in which it is
interpreted, it is the way in which it is interpreted. . . . For meaning is
not a simple and direct product of action itself, but of reflection upon
it. And the act of reflection is always another act, socially situated in its
own way

When a text describes rituals, the first question interpreters should

ask is “why?” The answer is often given explicitly in the text: ritu-
als are usually described to persuade people to perform them, or to
perform them in this particular way, or to accept the text and/or its
author’s authority to mandate the ritual and, perhaps, to officiate over
it. Attention to the purposes served by ritual texts should therefore
lead to analyzing their means of persuasion, that is, their rhetoric.

Leviticus 1-7 has a formal and structural feature that makes it some of the most systematic texts in the Hebrew Bible

Genesis and Exodus ground the authority of the divine lawgiver on the the basis of past acts of creation, blessing, and salvation
The laws and isntructions of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers stipulate behavrio in the present
while the blessings and curses that conclude Leviticus and Deuteronomy depicts the possible future determined by Israel’s response to the laws.

There is a story-list-sanction pattern in the Pentateuch.

The narrative frame-

work, however, that casts Leviticus 1–7 as divine prescriptions delivered
through Israel’s paradigmatic lawgiver, Moses, highlights the persua-
sive intent behind this text’s formulation as it stands.
 The narrative frame depicts this material as oral instruction.